An Interview With Robert Barry

The following telephone interview with Robert Barry occurred on March 21st, 2009

RB: What did you find interesting about my show at Lambert?

CS: I haven’t been in New York that long, this is now my 7th year, but I was in Ohio for a long, long time studying the history of contemporary art with Stephen Melville, so I was familiar with your work from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s and in my course have often used your Inert Gas Series as a comparison to John Baldessari. For me this is a way to talk about different relationships to the literal, Baldessari’s being more rhetorical than what I see in your work. But also to have some fun with the sense of humor that was flying around. That was the context I knotted you into. So it was a real surprise to see your show, to say “Wow, this is Robert Barry,” and to see all of that color, I was really affected by the color and the space.

 I do write, and when I saw your show I was just sort of scouring the galleries in Chelsea and it was all a big whirl and sometimes it takes a while for things to settle. But when I knew that Jenny Holzer was coming I started thinking of your show again and got really interested in what you were doing in comparison to her work, and now that I’ve seen Jenny Holzer I’m even more interested in that.

 

RB: I haven’t seen her show.

CS: One of the things that she’s doing, and what surprised me about your show, is that, well, there’s almost an aggressive campaign on the part of Holzer and the curators and the museum to hook her work into a history of painting, which is very interesting to me. So one of the things I also noticed in your show was the diptych, there’s a way in which you also are thinking about what it means to hold an allegiance to painting.

RB: The diptych - of course you’re talking about 62-08, fortysix years represented in the space between the two panels. I’ve done a number of those diptychs in recent years... putting an old work next to a recent, as one piece. Only an older artist , like me, can make such a work! But you aren’t familiar with all the work from those years in between the late 60's and what I’m doing now.... paintings, installations, videos, the photographic work, all of that. Most historians focus on the early work, the so-called "conceptual" work. But as an artist I must continue working, and trying to keep it interesting, at least for me. For many years, from 1968 to 1980 I didn’t do any painting. I stopped again for a few years in the late 90's. Now, in the last year or so, I’ve picked it up again. So if I feel that I need to paint to get my ideas across then I’ll use paint. Right now, in the last year or two, I’ve started to do paintings again. But, as you can see in the show I'm also working in other ways.

 

 
CS: Is this a more emphatic return to painting that is very recent for you?

RB: I go back to it when I need it. It all depends on where my art making takes me. It really comes out of the ideas that I want to convey and where I want my work to go. What’s interesting to me is that if I need paint, I use paint. If I need photography, or vinyl letters on a wall... I have to confront the situation, the space, the place that's given to me, and see what works. I'm doing a lot of video these days. I didn’t show one in the exhibit. Maybe I should have. I've always been interested in using time in my work. That's obvious in the diptych and the "Inert Gas" piece. The videos give me another way of incorporating time. So, I call myself an artist, and use whatever I need that works for me to do the art.

CS: In the Holzer show they are avoiding certain questions by talking about the influence of both Goya and Matisse on Holzer’s painting and her work as a whole. The earlier question or comparison between painter’s works that is relevant here is that offered by Benjamin Buchloh’s 1989 essay “Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions.” He was taking a position and saying that at some point you have to make a choice between Duchamp and Mondrian. Do you make that choice?

RB:  No, I don't think in those terms, I'm really an intuitive thinker.  What works, what seems to me to be an interesting direction based on my history, my feelings, on what I know, is how I work.  We are all influenced by countless things.  Some artistic, and some are not.  I can't isolate one over another.  I don't like to think that one thing influenced me more than anything else.  Except, as I've always said that my past work is my biggest influence on me.

CS: It’s clear that you’re not a willy-nilly grab-bag sort of person.

RB: If you follow the history of my work you may see in it a kind of logical progression. People tell me that one thing seems to follow out of another. It appears logical, but it’s really intuitive. It’s not something that’s just planned out ahead. For instance, I might be looking at an old piece and some idea will come to me that I might not have even thought about originally. And that’ll set me off in new a direction.

CS: Holzer is interested in making work that is “where people look.” She’s very interested in LED’s in particular, the text pieces that stream as though they were in nasdaq or Times Square.

RB:  Well, people are always looking at what catches their eye.  Isn't that what advertising is about?  To catch people's attention.  I guess that's what LED's are designed to do.  If you put an art object out into a public space, whether it's a sculpture or anything else, I suppose some people will look at it and recognise it as a piece of art, and think about it.  Others will just not be interested.  Sometimes it's nice to put something outside.  I've done it.  However, when people go to a museum or a gallery, that's what they do, they look - they become engaged with the art.  That's why they go there.  So, even more quiet, subtle work can be seen and appreciated.

CS: Her installation peices are pretty difficult to escape, they’re very insistent, they don’t have the more quiet sense of text that your words have.

RB: I don’t usually use text. Occasionally I do, but in a very different way. I think the thing that distinguishes me from other so-called language artists is that I use words. Isolated words. Words as objects. I don't use language the way that a writer would, to convey a message, or tell a story. I try not to moralize. I use the word as an object in itself. Whatever its history, it's meaning, it's associations. It's look... In the context that it’s in, a gallery, an outside space. I would even hesitate to call myself an artist who uses language. I use words. Words as objects, and of course these words are loaded and meant to grab the viewer in a way that they can interact with them - if they choose to do so. Words come from us. They don't exist in the world outside of us. They speak to us. I like working in an art context, where people come to experience art in a serious way. And, by the way, when you say “just looking”, I’m not really interested in just looking. I’m interested in looking, thinking, feeling, being engaged. Participating... Looking is what we do in our practical, everyday lives. Hopefully, one comes with expectation, and with some history, some knowledge, and will have a deeper experience that may begin with looking.

CS: I’m looking right now at a painting by Mel Bochner that was in a recent Whitney Biennial called Nothing from 2003 and on a black ground there’s a list of words, a thesuarus, “nothing, negation, non-existence, not-being, none,” etc. And that etc. is important, the painting ends with a comma as though the list is going to go on. But his sense of a word list is really quite different than your own, and so the other thing that I have in my hand here is your Word List of 2008: diffident, beyond, imply, wonder, almost, ineffable. And what’s striking me is that your words in this list do seem to have a very strong kind of pressure on a limit of knowledge.

RB: What do you mean by a limit of knowledge?

CS: “Almost” and “ineffable” are at the edge but there is a there that is palpable. “Another” you could say is a way of crossing that distance.

RB: Art is a form of knowledge. There’s this odd dichotomy, that a work of art should be both complete in itself, but should also have implications or associations beyond itself. Some artists rely solely on ambiguity. Mostly figurative artists. This kind of work I don’t find very interesting. Of course the viewer, whoever’s looking at it, is going to have their own interpretation. They’re going to take away from it whatever they want. You can’t get into their head and tell them what to think. My words are complete unto themselves, and there’s the implication that they go beyond themselves. The way I present them, they have many meanings, or no specific meaning. The person looking at the work is going to be looking at it in his or her own way and I always must take that into consideration when I make art. Once it leaves your studio, once it leaves the gallery, who knows what people are going to do with it? But ultimately, that’s where the meaning is going to be found.

CS: I do see these as related to the nouveau roman and concrete poetry.

RB: I think that’s a mistake. I’m not a poet, I’m an artist. There’s nothing new about using words and art. When I was a school kid we took a trip to the National Gallery in Washington and saw the Van Eyck picture of the Angel and the Madonna. I asked “Why are the words coming out of the mouth of the Madonna upside down?” The teacher didn’t even realize that they were upside down. Actually it's common in Flemish paintings. Of course, if God is in heaven looking down, it’s not upside down to Him! So the idea of language or words as objects being used in the visual arts is not a new idea, the two are entwined, they always have been.

 
CS: So the word lists and the crosses are very different with regard to orientation in relation to the reader and one of the things that strikes me is that it’s a cliche about abstract painting that you can turn it upside down or sideways and whenever such a cliche is actually materialized it doesn’t become trite as an actual experience, there’s something going on that’s much richer than any cliche. I’m looking at Word List (Painting) and Red Cross (Painting) from 2008, and wondering if Red Cross has four different hooks. Does it matter to you how they are hung?

RB: It does, they are signed in the back in a certain way. I did a series in the ‘70s called "omnidirectional drawings" where it didn’t matter how the object was hung. I liked the fact that a decision had to be made on the part of the person who owned it. That they had a responsibility to participate in it's presentation. It's an extension of that idea that I was talking about, about how meaning can change when a work goes out into the world. So I wanted to give some responsibility to the viewer in a very specific way, how is it going to be presented. Presentation is very important to me. Where and when a painting is hung and how, in what situation, really has a lot to do with its ultimate meaning. In some sense it could be as important as what’s actually in the painting, the content of the work itself. So the idea of giving some responsibilty to the owner, the viewer, was something that made sense in terms of how meaning is made. It wasn’t a cliche, it was really a part of the work itself, built into it so to speak. It's about how artworks really exist in the world.

CS: From there I think it’s nice to think of the installation at Yvon Lambert, and what interested me is that there were these very discrete works, Red Cross, Word List (Painting), and word lists as texts on the wall.

RB: My next show in May in Paris is called “Word Lists.” It’s a general idea I’ve been working on for the last year or so. Instead of arranging the words in a sort of random way, to cover a wall, as I've been doing for the last few years, I've decided to present them in a more direct, organized way. Arranging them in a line, cross or a circle is a returning to the past, but in a different way.

CS: What I enjoyed about the exhibit at Yvon Lambert, and what is relevant to the conversation we’re having about orientation and painting, is that while these felt like discrete presentations of words in terms of medium and space, it was also really interesting to see this installation as a whole and to think of a word list as something that is very plastic, it can be a thousand words long or three words long, and so where a work began and ended in the space of an installation that is involving such word lists became kind of interesting to me.

RB: Yes. The lists do imply extending beyond the confines of the immediate space. You may not know about the typewriter drawings from the ‘70's that would have a list of adjectives and adverbs that could go on for 5 or 6 pages. They would describe something that was indescribable, or at least not visible.

CS:  Do you find that over the years you've acquired a very specific vocabulary?

RB: Yes, and I add to it all the time. I draw from a list of about two to three hundred words. I’m always adding to it and taking some away.

CS: And is there anything that you can describe as a quality of those two or three hundred words?

RB: A state of mind, or suggest an some activity, a quality...not specific objects like a table, a chair, a tv set or computer.

CS: I’m interested in these states of mind that are transmitted telepathically, and I’m thinking also of what I mentioned earlier in the Word List that has “ineffable” at the bottom and “another” at the top. What I do see in the language that you’ve chosen and some of the things that you do with it is - I looked up the word telepathy and it means ‘”to be affected by distance.” It’s intriguing to find these sentences which have a completely different force.

RB: The history of the piece... the dates are 1969-2009. Those specific ones were originally for an exhibition in 1969 but were never shown. To keep with the idea of this show, the time theme that the show was about, I wanted a work that spanned the time Lambert and I have been working together. 40 years. I first started working with him in Paris in 1969. And this show and the one in Paris is really a 40th anniversary show. I originally ment them to be shown in Sao Paolo in Brazil, but there was a political problem in Brazil at that time, and the American artists in the show decided to protest by not exhibiting our work. So the works were never shown. Originally, they probably would have been presented only in the catalogue. This time, I showed them in a different version in vinyl color letters. It’s an old work in an new format, spanning those forty years. Hence the dates.

CS: There’s another sentence from 1970, “Something only you can realize.”

RB: I thought that might be interesting to see it on the window before you go in. It does put some responsibility on the viewer. Also, I think of it as a welcome in.

CS: Looking at your own reflection?

RB: You have a responsibility when you go in there and deal with this work.

CS: Now with your word lists and crosses and circles, are you thinking less about sentences, do the words as words, as objects, have a different sense for you than they did earlier?

RB: I don't want to think in terms of sentences. The window piece is from 1970. I don't think it's different, but I'm always looking for new words.

 Copyright Catherine Spaeth, 2009

Image Credits:  Inert gas Series: Neon, 1969.  Two photographs, text.  2 photos, each 8X10", 1 text, 11x8 1/2", 20 1/2x40" frame, © Robert Barry, Courtesy of the artist and Yvon Lambert Paris, New York; Installation View, Exhibition: RB 62-08, © Robert Barry, Courtesy of the artist and Yvon Lambert Paris, New York; 62-08, 1962-2008, diptych: left panel oil on canvas, right panel, acrylic on canvas, left: 56x47.75", right: 36x36", © Robert Barry, Courtesy of the artist and Yvon Lambert Paris, New York; Jenny Holzer, Green Purple Cross, 2008, and Blue Cross, 2008. Three double-sided electronic LED signs (two with blue and green diodes on front and blue and red diodes on back and one with blue and red diodes on front and blue and green diodes on back); and seven double-sided electronic LED signs with blue diodes on front and blue and red diodes on back. 59 x 122 5/8 x 100 11/16 in. (149.9 x 311.4 x 255.8 cm); and 85 13/16 x 109 x 100 11/16 in. (217.9 x 276.9 x 255.8 cm). Installation view: Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, 2008. Texts: Erlauf, 1995, Arno, 1996, Blue, 1998 (Green Purple Cross); and Arno, 1996 (Blue Cross). © 2009 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photo: Lili Holzer-Glier. Collection of the artist; courtesy Yvon Lambert, Paris (Green Purple Cross); and David Roberts Art Foundation, London (Blue Cross); Mel Bochner, Nothing, 2003, oil on canvas, 45x60", Collection of Jill and Peter Kraus, image courtesy of http://www.carnegiemellontoday.com /article.asp?Aid=112; Word List, 2008, acrylic paint on wall, dimensions variable, © Robert Barry, Courtesy of the artist and Yvon Lambert Paris, New York; Jan Van Eyck, The Annunciation. Before 1435. Oil on wood transferred to canvas. The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., USA.; Red Cross (Painting), 2008, acrylic on canvas, 70x70", © Robert Barry, Courtesy of the artist and Yvon Lambert Paris, New York; Installation view, exhibition:  RB 62-08, © Robert Barry, Courtesy of the artist and Yvon Lambert Paris, New York; A Secret Desire Transmitted Telepathically, 1969-2009; A Volitional State of Mind Transmitted Telepathically, 1969-2009; A Particular Feeling Transmitted Telepathically, 1969-2009; A Particualr Emotion Transmitted Telepathically, 1969-2009; A Great Concern Transmitted Telepathically, 1969-2009, vinyl letters on wall, dimensions variable, © Robert Barry, Courtesy of the artist and Yvon Lambert Paris, New York; Something Only You Can Realize, 1970, vinyl letters, dimensions variable, © Robert Barry, Courtesy of the artist and Yvon Lambert Paris, New York; Red Cross, 2008 9detail0 cast acrylic, dimensions variable, 12 words, each letter 1 inch high, each letter approximately 12 inches wide, © Robert Barry, Courtesy of the artist and Yvon Lambert Paris, New York.

Contemporary Genre's Homelessness

In Brooke Davis Anderson’s wall text for Dargerism: Contemporary Artists and Henry Darger,” she writes “By leaning into the boundaries of the Western canon, 'Dargerism' illustrates how one self-taught master has spawned a new movement, a wholly new ‘ism.’” Other wall text contradicts this spawning - Justine Kurland, for example, was photographing her nomadic waifs before she ever knew of Darger. And there are just too many artists not in this show who have been doing similar work for Darger alone to carry the weight of an “ism.” There is something that extends beyond him and into the fields nearby: In a broader Hegelian manner genre painting is making its appearance in contemporary art.

When Hegel writes about the period that he calls Romanticism, which for him emerges with what he refers to as “so-called genre,” it is the period in which Classical beauty is no longer appropriate to art. Spirit withdraws from nature in order to be intimate with itself, and at this time “the human being, as actual subjectivity, must be made the principle, and thereby alone...does the anthropomorphic reach its consummation.”* Jan Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece, 1426, marks a turn towards Christ as a particular individual, and subjectivity is now at home in the world. Idealism gives way to contingency - “romantic art leaves externality to go its own way again for its part freely and independently, and in this respect allows any and every material, down to flowers, trees and the commonest household gear, to enter the representation without hindrance even in its contingent natural existence.” In its capriciousness painting falls apart from the unity of classical sculpture and becomes divided among genre painting, landscape, still life and portaiture. One can even pick up on national differences - whereas German genre paintings can only reveal “snarling and vicious people,” Dutch paintings leave one in a jovial mood.***

Robert Campin’s Merode Altarpiece,1425-1428, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is an excellent example of what Hegel means by being at home in the world. In the Annunciation God appears to Mary as a teeny cross-bearing figure, barely visible as compared to the gleaming copper pot in the background. This rather insignificant figure has flown through the window of the home where this particular man loves this particular woman, and in this love “everything else which by way of interests, circumstances and aims belongs otherwise to actual being and life, [is elevated] into an adornment of this emotion; it tugs everything into this sphere and assigns a value to it only in its relation thereto.”****

In Delia Brown's Autumn Morning, 2008, a fictitious child sits in the window of a well appointed home, a pile of Care Bears filling up the space of a roomy arm chair. In the exhibition "Precious,"false portraits of overly sweet mothers and daughters oozing with silk, pearls and flushing cheeks are staged fantasies caught in the impossible desires of women who never had children. The small scale of the paintings and the exaggerated plushness of being at home in the world is meant as a critique of painting's gendered terms, in which being too precious in one's work is never as serious as masculine austerity and scale. Similarly, Amy Cutler's miniature paintings of nomadic women from elsewhere- pictured above - carry their worlds upon their backs, with no ground below them or heaven above. Carrying their children and households with them as they go, contingent necessity is an adornment in an exotic world without men. Homeless genre enters the more conceptual strategy of Joy Garnett who retrieves images that grab her from the public domain and files them until she can no longer remember their context. Underscoring their placelessness she paints from these digital images in "one go," marking the gap in time and place with the spontaneity of painting.

Stephen Bann wrote that Pop Art was a return to genre as a “generic challenge to personal expression,”***** and it is also true that Gerhard Richter’s self-proclaimed banality was a response to Neo Expressionism. But in the New York ‘80s, also responding to Neo-Expressionism, there was not so much an interest in genre as there was in style - painters such as Sherrie Levine, Ross Bleckner and Philip Taafe, choosing from the work of Bridget Riley or Paul Feeley whose reception marked the problem of style, appropriated their motifs as their own. When genre occurred it was also in the sense of detaching oneself from its conventions and appropriating the style of another. Emphasizing culture above nature, April Gornik evokes Rockwell Kent in Pulling Moon, and in Light Before Heat, also from 1983, it is Fitz Hugh Lane. Genre painting in contemporary art existed, but at this time it had a relation to style that is no longer relevant in the same way.

It is perhaps symptomatic of this general mood that Jennifer Reeves creates characters out of painterly styles, appearing as though in the shift to the genre scene - as here in "Which way to the real deal?".

Currently at the Neuberger Museum of Art is “Future Tense,” the last of several genre exhibitions curated by Dede Young. Holding the recent work of 60 artists it is a landscape painting show, with the exception of a handful of artists working in other media. Striking is how very recent and varied these paintings are - many if not most are here by the courtesy of a gallery. Here is a brief interview excerpted from email exchanges:

CS: How do you find that your exhibitions of still life and landscape painting have informed an understanding of postmodern art? What is the role of genre for our time?
DY: The show supports the adaptability of traditional media to engage immediately relevant issues such as the environment, politics, over population and our use of non-renewable fossil fuel, the war over oil. The show pushes the tradition of landscape forward and reflects our time--all the work is post 9/11, and it demonstrates anxiety levels in this decade.
CS: I take your response to mean that there is nothing special about having a stake in genre, per se, that it exists, and reflects our time, but also that the shows that interested you during your research had nothing to do with genre, but environmental issues at large.
DY: You are correct: historic / traditional genres are a taproot that feed artists---the past is simply information upon which artists can draw. Genres are not relevant, per se, but are great fodder for artists to adapt and adopt. I am looking at how artists move forward and deflect the past. Today's artists cannot claim 'landscape' as a new idea, so how do they infuse it with contemporary relevance? The exhibition explores this, and today 'everything is environment.'

By this account, genre is an empty form for content, losing all its priveleges. For the purposes of "Future Tense" that is enough , but that there was so much to select from is really quite something. I don't need to list what has been visible, enough of it is around, enough to know that still life has been disqualified as sculpture and that history painting at this time has no identity as such unless it is bound to style. But there is now a genre painting in which the sense of being at home in the world has disappeared, and artists were drawn to Darger because of it. What I have gathered is by no means a summing up or an answer and the question still stands: What is the role of genre for our time?

By Catherine Spaeth

*Aesthetics, Lectures on Fine Art, by G.W.F. Hegel, T.M. Knox, trans., Volume II, Oxford University Press, c. 1975, p. 519. First published posthumously in 1835 - Hegel died in 1830.
**Ibid., p. 527.
***Ibid., V. I, p. 169.
****Ibid., V I p. 563
*****Stephen Bann, “Pop Art and Genre,” New Literary History, Vol. 24, No. 1, Culture and Everyday Life (Winter 1993) pp. 115-124.

Image credits: Amy Cutler, Dwelling, 2005,Gouache on paper,22 x 30 inches,Copyright Amy Cutler, 2005, Collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects; Robert Campin, Merode Altarpiece, 1425-1428, Met, courtesy of the world wide web; Delia Brown, Autumn Morning, 2008, 11x14”, oil on wood, Courtesy od D’Amelio-Terras Gallery; Joy Garnett, Harbor,2007,Oil on canvas,60" x 70",Private Collection. Image courtesy of the artist and Winkleman Gallery, New York; April Gornik, Pulling Moon, 1983, oil on canvas, 76x80”, Courtesy of Danese Gallery; Jennifer Reeves, Which way to the real deal?, 2005, Gouache on paper, 11 x 14 inches, courtesy of Ramis Barquet; Tomory Dodge, Salton Sargasso, 2005, oil on canvas, 90 X 85 inches, Courtesy of CRG Gallery; April Gornik, Light Before Heat, 1983, oil on canvas, 66 x 132 inches, courtesy of Danese Gallery, New York.

Catherine Spaeth

Flags of Revolt and Defiance: Polly Apfelbaum

Flags are to be seen clearly from the distance of the moon, but Polly Apfelbaum’s Flags of Revolt and Defiance (2006) are sharply cut away from their traditional field. A folio of vivid silkscreens on paper, blossom templates are taken to flags of resistance ranging from the Bourbons to the Black Panthers. These templates lend themselves to the logo - typically identified more with a corporate brand than with the explicitly political communication of a flag. In collaboration with Tomas Vu-Daniel and his assistants at the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies, Apfelbaum’s exacting precision in this medium (a precision that required two years of effort) heightens the intensity of color. Their cut of line is completely different than the bleed of color Apfelbaum is most known for, but the hold upon the viewer is no less saturating.

That these flags are intended to be hung vertically on the wall also shifts them from their horizontal register, further emphasizing the graphic field of the logo. Tacked to the wall at the top two corners and lined in rows, their presentation mimics that of a logo design exploration, as in the c. 2000 ExxonMobil example below. In viewing Flags of Revolt and Defiance, however, there is no acceptance or rejection on the basis of a desired unifying concept.

I have always associated Apfelbaum’s work with a powerful phenomenological insistence upon the materialism of direct experience, and this insistence occurs most forcefully in the horizontal field. According to the official code, a flag must never touch the ground. That a flag should have both avoidance of and claim upon the ground as what constitutes it places Flags of Revolt and Defiance in an important dialogue with what Apfelbaum refers to as her “fallen paintings.” Standing at the edges of a piece like Blossom (2001), currently on exhibit at Locks Gallery in Philadelphia , your own body defines the impermanence in the actual fragility of velvet petals laid upon the floor, and is at the same time held by the absorption of their color stains. The immediacy of “one shot painting” has been taken over and fleshed out at our feet in an array that summons the discretion of touch.

In the early ‘80s Apfelbaum was in Spain, away from the New York art scene at a time when cynicism had crept into painterly practice. While Douglas Crimp wrote “The End of Painting,” Apfelbaum was learning from Arte Povera and Supports/Surfaces that the conventions of painting and its exhibition remained quite full. More recently she began to think explicitly about horizontality and verticality as different registers in dialogue with each other.

What space does the logo occupy? There have always been the occasional artists to use a personal logo in the place of signature, such as Leonardo’s flying eyeball, or Whistler’s butterfly. And since Andy Warhol, numerous artists have appropriated corporate logos into their work. In 1968, Richard Artschwager, like Apfelbaum occupying a space somewhere between Minimalism and Pop, began to distribute his blips across a variety of architectural surfaces. But these were of a time that emphasized local incident as much as the more abstract mobility of a logo across a variety of surfaces. For Arstchwager, there was also the psychic effect of horizontal and vertical format - formats owing the force of their address to the difference between landscape and portraiture. When Apfelbaum flips her flags from the horizontal to the vertical register, she is also thinking of this psychic address, and at a time when the personal logo is all the rage.

For a while now I have been thinking about the increasing mobility of art. People first began talking about this when the international art star appeared, moving from site to site to install a project. The distinction between artist and curator increasingly blurred in this context. As the market for contemporary art accelerated, the walls between the museum and the market became permeable in the speed and fluidity of movement. Further, since Murakami’s collaboration with Louis Vuitton in 2003 an artwork has the mobility of a logo across a variety of surfaces. This is apparent in The Gap t-shirt campaign, and we can see it now in Google’s artist theme.

Google’s artist’s themes are a new feature for the personalized home page that, from a list of artist’s names, provides an artist's work as the banner backdrop to the Google search bar. The work of art will change over the course of the day - it is a fragment without title, known only by the proper name of the artist. And the artist’s names will range from Jeff Koons to Lance Armstrong, a bizarre blurring that can only come from the notion of art as simultaneously popular and distinctively elite - a marketer’s dream.

I can think of no artist other than Polly Apfelbaum who in Flags of Defiance and Revolt has critically inhabited the structure and history of the logo as an enterprise. At the same time, few have so critically occupied the horizontal field, exploiting the difference of its register from the vertical as a dialogue with the different aspects of each and their corresponding histories. In considering how firmly these registers can stand apart in her work, I asked Apfelbaum if she thought that while her floor pieces should not appear on Google’s theme palette, her Flags of Revolt and Defiance might have a different relation to mobility and make absolute sense there. The artist agreed.

It used to be that the autonomy of painting in the vertical register was challenged by the threat of becoming wallpaper. In our time, this threat is as likely to be seen as an invitation without challenge. In responding to the visual culture of the logo and its mobility, Flags of Revolt and Defiance positions art’s relation to visual culture in critical dialogue, rather than choosing between flight or embrace.

Image credits:Polly Apfelbaum, Portfolio Title: Flags of Revolt and Defiance, 2006, Color silkscreen, Paper Size: 30 x 19 inches each panel, Carrier: Coventry Rag, smooth, bright white, Edition Size: 27, Portfolio of 31, Courtesy of Leroy Neiman Center for Print Studies; Exxon/Mobil logo presentation, c. 2000, private collection; Bubbles, 2001, synthetic velvet and fabric dye, 12 ft in diameter, Courtesy Locks Gallery, Philadelphia; Richard Artschwager, blips, 1976, Photo by Matthew, Septimus, Courtesy P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center; Pollly Apfelbaum, Flags of Revoltand Defiance - Yippies; Polly Apfelbaum, Flags of Revolt and Defiance - Kurdistan Worker's party; AT&T logo exploration, private collection.

By Catherine Spaeth

Catherine Spaeth

David Diao: A Picaresque Tale of Ruins

David Diao’s paintings over time have been oddly resonant with their historical moments. Diao began exhibiting paintings in New York in 1967, and Untitled (1969) stood out in the exhibit “High Times Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975” for its monochromatic scale and subtlety of gesture. A glowing pale pink with a gentle moire effect belied the aggressive and rather silly athletics of repeatedly running from a distance to sweep a dripping sponge of paint over the large horizontal field propped against the wall. This entire exhibit was shot through by multiple and varied desires to take painting to the next level at a time that it was under siege, but it was in Diao’s painting that a certain allegiance to Modernist painting was held, even to the medium-specific aim of revealing the supporting stretchers as a mark of tension in painting’s support. For Artforum in 1969 Emily Wassermann wrote of Diao's paintings that “...these are purely optical surfaces which somehow are not sensed as tactile or palpable.” * Sheer opticality is code for Modernist painting’s achievement, and at this time it was both notable and belated.

Cardboard tubes, push brooms and squeegees came into use during the seventies, but Diao eventually abandoned such approaches as they were “too technological in their thinking.”** In the ‘80s Diao realized along with everyone else that everything he was doing was already a type, that no empirical research within a technological approach to painting was going to ever bust out of convention, as convention is all there is. In response to this "end of painting" other painters began to appropriate styles one after the other, such as Ross Bleckner or Phillip Taaffe, or like David Reed to treat the brush stroke as a free-floating signifier so slick that it might slide across the surface with the click of a mouse. Faced with Postmodernism’s refusal of authenticity and origin, Diao worried over what it meant to “take painting to the next step.” Modernist self-criticism entered the scene, but in the guise of other technologies absorbed into the field of painting: the famous photograph of Malevich’s first show, Alfred Barr’s chart, eye charts, graphs and statistical diagrams marking the sales and exhibition of the artists own work, served as templates for the compositional field. Any distinctions between medium-specific self-criticism and anecdotal self-referentiality were lost in these maneuvers to the point that in Diao's postmodern hands, painting had become colorfully picaresque, somewhere between romance and satire in its enterprise and failure.

Diao explains that the critic Robert Pincus Witten referred to his early paintings, such as Untitled (1969), as ‘oriental screens’ linking Diao’s Chinese heritage to his work. This was long before identity politics was all the rage, and Diao “thought it was a denigration at the time, and it pushed my hand. I began to use Warhol’s synthetic color, and it was only then that I came close to High Modernism and Warhol’s kitsch.” As his art historical references became increasingly personal, he rose to the challenge that Pincus-Witten set before him so long ago, and began to use Bruce Lee as his altar ego, the pop-culture icon standing in for Diao the action painter. More reserved than this brazen parody is Lying 1, 2000, a silkscreened photograph of Diao lounging in a Chinese moon-gazing chair, facing us and set against a Jackson Pollock. This image in turn is set against an expansive monochromatic field. With his own painter’s identity in the languorous pose of the colonialist’s imagination, this is not simply a one-liner but is infused with a longing that, like Manet’s Olympia, implicates painter and viewer alike.

Longing fuses with mourning in Endangered Species 2, 2004, a map of modern houses in New Canaan Conn., with a corresponding key showing those houses that have been demolished and those that are at risk. Against the deep blue monochrome of an architect’s plan, an appropriated graphic system tells the story of Modernism’s demise in the face of newly formed suburban identities appropriating from a more distant past and in search of something bigger. In Sitting in the Glass House, 2003, Diao plants himself in Philip Johnson's house. Johnson died only two years later - visiting the house at the very end of Johnson's life, Diao is gathering up the daily news at the moment of loss and preservation.

Born in 1943, Diao left his home in Chengdu - claimed by the Communist Party for office space - at the age of six, eventually joining his father in New York. He never saw this home again, returning 30 years later to find that it had been demolished. To some extent identifying with his father’s role as an engineer for Robert Moses, alongside of becoming a painter Diao is a connoisseur of Modern architecture. His own home is the Marcel Breuer Wolfson Trailer House. Even though this is one of John Paul Getty’s elite Spartan mansions, the trailer home fused to the walls of the house exhibits what is now a blend of high Modernism and Pop culture in the place where he lives. Diao spends much of his time obsessively preserving this house and campaigning for its survival in the face its extinction.

A sense of loss relating to his own identity appears in Diao’s most recent paintings. In 1991, Diao began exhibiting in Taiwan, and in that same year his father died on a tennis court in New York. Diao now exhibits in Beijing, and in his recent exhibition, March 1-April 5th at Courtyard Gallery Diao exhibited a cycle of paintings named for the house he had known as a child, “Da Hen Li House.” In From My Memory (2007) the house plan appears to the far right of a long horizontal field. Most prominent is the red tennis court against what is otherwise an expanse of dark green, and the stairs that mark the passage from the interior to the exterior of the house. The blankness of the remaining monochromatic field is what can no longer be remembered. The red tennis court reads like a Chinese seal and a burial plot holding the bare memories of a man displaced so long ago that he no longer knows the language, and whose earlier sweeping horizontal gestures were an embodied erasure of his cultural past as much as they were the making of an oriental screen.

An aesthetic of ruins is in full play in Chinese contemporary art. David Spalding describes contemporary Chinese photography as driven by the haunting ruins of “the most radical restructuring of urban space on earth.” China may have bypassed Modernism, but David Diao is in tune with its postmodern ruins, taking up his residency in a field of bold and fragile geometries.

By Catherine Spaeth

* Emily Wassermann, “Three Younger Artists, “ Artforum, Summer 1969, p. 31
**All artist’s statements are from personal interview.

Photos courtesy of David Diao, in order of appearance: Untitled, 1969, acrylic on canvas, 72x96", Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, Ohio, gift of Ruth Ruosh; Barnett newman, Chronology of Work, 1990-92, acrylic and vinyl on canvas, 96x180", FRAC Bretagne;Lying 1, 2000, acrylic and silkscreen on canvas, 79x115"; Endangered Species 2, 2004, acrylic, silkscreen and enamel on canvas, 84x108"; From My Memory, 2007, vinyl, acrylic and oil on canvas, 42x78"; Demolish 2, 2008, acrylic, vinyl and oil on canvas, 24x24".

Catherine Spaeth

Whitney Biennial 2008: Painting's Failure (Again)

It has become almost obligatory in a Whitney Biennial review to bemoan the lack of painting, which tells us that a certain idea of “painting” remains a standard against which to measure this art exhibition's failure. But painting is always included, differently each time.

The 2004 Biennial congratulated itself for the inclusion of painting. Chrissie Iles wrote a whole essay on it in the plush exhibition catalog, Richard Prince, Alex Hay, Robert Mangold, Mel Bochner, and David Hockney played grandfather to a younger generation of painters with the belief that such intergenerational dialog could “make sense of a world gone wrong,” suggesting a “continuing desire to reaffirm art’s ability to articulate alternative thinking, and restore a sense of meaning to a world in which the nihilistic and the restorative coexist in all too fragile balance.” In response to 9/11, the curators hauled painting back into the Whitney as the paternalistic fold of alternative thinking - a history of art, built on ruptures and continuities, for which painting - unlike any other medium - remains the authoritative model. But the paternalistic tone of authority that Modernism lay claim to was lost in the conviction that painting was now only a matter of making the next move in a game.*

In the 2006 Biennial there was an awful lot of painting, by more than twenty artists. This was in the inclusive mood of the art fair and the “alternative spaces” that sprout in its midst. There was some citing of Dave Hickey here and there, some criteria for alternative culture, and references to de Toqueville. The older generation here was represented by the drawings of prison-house punk rock legend Daniel Johnston, and the previously censored ‘70s sex paintings by Dorothy Iannone. For the most part, painting appeared as an expression of rebellion, really only still in the world as a medium because of its contingencies. The most realist were Marilyn Minter’s glamour-trash, and Rudolf Stingel’s ennui, the most sensitively beautiful the s&m watercolors of Monica Majoli. Curatorial choices were for the most part driven by the desire to express a cultural attitude.

It is almost as though in the 2008 Whitney Biennial the art historical “grandfather effect” has taken hold, with the pendulum swinging back in the other direction. And notice how tidily the elders line up, it’s a structuralist’s toy:

John Baldessari - conceptual art
Robert Bechtle - photorealism
Mary Heilmann - pop abstract expressionism
Olivier Mosset - the monochrome

It is not the case, therefore, that painting isn’t important to this exhibition - it is quite important. A more interesting question is what might be occurring in claims for painting as a relevant medium for our time? Ellen Harvey, Karen Kilimnik and Joe Harvey are the painters on board.

One of the things that strikes me about this show is the stated embrace of failure. In her own voice, Ellen Harvey says through the headset that her painting installation Museum of Failure: Collection of Possible Subjects and Invisible Self-Portraits (2007) “is a monument to failure, the ghost of the piece that might have been...hand made representation is automatically a failure - let’s start off by failing as extravagantly as possible.” Photography appears in two ways - first as the hole in a carnival prop, through which one puts one’s head, and second in the carefully rendered self-portraits, taken from photographs that have obliterated their subject by a flash in the mirror. It is the naive and false despair of the beginning art student, struck by inadequacy in the face of nature and photography. Why the feigned appeal to such misunderstandings and false anxieties? Harvey's failure is just another parody of a diehard narrative that keeps re-appearing because we can congratulate ourselves for knowing it. Photography and the death of painting: Standing between the trompe l’oeil wall of obliterated self-portraits and the discomfort of a bank of fluorescent light, perhaps we are to feel obliterated by the flash as well? The overwrought machinery of it fails me, and I respond to this as rhetoric, as just another move in the game to legitimize the ambition to simply keep on painting. And this is what Ellen Harvey excels at, it is all about finding that one little hook in order to maintain sheer continuity in fear of its end. Painting is only the prop.

Likewise, Karen Kilimnik’s “bad paintings” of peacocks and horses, nearly serve more as the prop for the chandeliered room that contains them (not pictured here) than as paintings on their own. Like Kilimnik, numerous artists have toyed with the context of exhibition but without taking so much obvious pleasure in playing the role of a false aristocracy. In Kilimnik’s playacting dollhouse, viewing her paintings, luscious as they occasionally may be, is only possible - we are told - because of the social conventions of the class they serve. Whatever space for the unconscious there might be has been wallpapered over by culture’s demands to fit the role. It’s the stuff that good little girls are made of, and we are put in the uncomfortable position of wanting to submit.

Differently, each of these three younger painters confound the categories that their elders so neatly embody, and what they share is their call upon space beyond the traditional limits of painting. Harvey devises proposals that allow her to continue tediously filling up space as though she were an anonymous tradesman, her earlier landscapes as "beauty" displacing graffiti, for ex., and Kilimnik's miniatures invite us to a "let's pretend" world that feeds on status and glamour in the spirit of denial. Harvey and Kilimnik express little trust in inherited conventions, even as they compulsively perform them, milking the endgame for whatever it's worth.

Joe Bradley’s flimsy monochrome assemblages put their weight elsewhere. His paintings nearly march into space in a manner closer to sculpture than to painting. This call upon space knowingly owes some inheritance to Russian Constructivism, Stella’s early shaped canvases and Minimalist theatricality. His reference to the ludic pleasure of childhood succeeds in holding a rather bizarre tension between abstraction and representation, not adequately represented by the press photograph, which registers figuration a little too quickly. We are equally submitted to the cultural code by it's very gendered terms, primary colors, and infantilizing form and scale, but the false burdens of elitism and representational malaise so rhetorically presented by Harvey and Kilimnik fall away here. By turns humbly joyful and overpowering, there is something of a figural logo militarism that parades about the room, so that abstract sensual pleasure and impending corporate anonymity and subjection appear at once. This was unexpected, and didn't feel like just another overwrought move in the game we all know.

By Catherine Spaeth

* Chrissie Iles, "Altered States," Whitney Biennial 2004, Chrissie Iles, Shamim M. Momin, Debra Singer, c. 2004, Whitney museum of Art, pp. 56-69.

Photo Credits: Ellen Harvey, Museum of Failure: Collection of Impossible Subjects & Invisible Self-Portraits, 2007 (installation view, Luxe Gallery, New York, 2007). Rear-illuminated hand-engraved plexiglass and aluminum frame, fluorescent lights, wall paint, and oil on canvas, twelve parts, in secondhand frames, 96 x 120 in. (243.9 x 304.8 cm). Collection of the artist; courtesy Luxe Gallery, New York;Robert Bechtle, Six Houses on Mound Street, 2006. Oil on canvas, 36 x 66 in. (91.4 x 167.6 cm). Private collection;Olivier Mosset, Untitled, 2007. Sprayed liner on canvas, 48 x 48 in. (121.9 x 121.9 cm).;Karen Kilimnik, the castle great staircase, Scotland, 2007. Water soluble oil color on canvas, 14 x 11 in. (35.6 x 27.9 cm). Collection of The Stephanie and Peter Brant Foundation;Joe Bradley, Installation view, Joe Bradley, Peres Projects, Berlin, 2007; from left: Cavalry, 2007; Itz, 2007; Night Runner with Strike, 2007; The Thing, 2007. All photos courtesy of the Whitney Museum of Art.

Catherine Spaeth