Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Freedom and the Postwar Avant-Garde

By

Reviewed by Erik Hmiel

The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War
by Louis Menand
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 880pp., $18.89

When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I played in punk-rock bands. Not just punk-rock bands, hardcore-punk-rock bands, bands you might even call post-punk. We played shows in basements and garages, record stores and art spaces, cafes and homeless shelters. We played to 100 people and to zero. We hated the radio and were enthralled by our involvement with a national network of young people who made music outside of the confines of a commercial ecosystem. I even came to disdain the calls of older independent musicians who–suddenly confronted with a loss of revenue from illegal downloading services like Napster and the bootleg copies offered by the CD-R—made genuine, heartfelt appeals to the connection between artistic labor and material compensation. Punk was “beyond” such an outdated way of thinking about art. What was truly radical and inspirational about punk-rock was that no one cared about money. We existed in our own ecosystem, played to each other, patronized specific record stores, and otherwise went on with our lives without the metaphysical baggage associated with being ‘Artists’. Without knowing it, we simultaneously embraced the abiding ideal of the historical avant-garde’s sense of radicality—art as oblique challenge to staid conventions—and what the German art historian Hans Belting, writing in 1987, called ‘The End of the History of Art.’[1] [Read more…]

Presence as Abstraction, as Beguiling Obfuscation, in the Works of Leon Kossoff

By

Leon Kossoff: A Life in Painting, at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, NYC (with concurrent exhibitions at LA Louver in Los Angeles, through 9 April 2022, and Annely Juda Fine Art in London)
Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx

The first painting greeting us in the Mitchell-Innes & Nash exhibition is, aptly, a self portrait. Smaller than the other pieces in the show, monochromatic, it packs the power of dynamite. The man represented closeup looks aghast, terrified even. His eyes stare down with dismay at something off canvas, an abyss? Hell? Malleable, the face is agitated by a chaos of brushstrokes. The boundaries between the head and its surroundings are unclear, as if everything was made of the same substance: mud. Mud, here, is nicely symbolic not only for its biblical intimation — Man being dipped, thrown, trampled in and yanked from the “miry mud” — but the muddiness of mind is also equally appropriate. While his portraits often halted at an opacity in the sitter, Kossoff had a pretty good idea of what he was about: uncertain about everything. He could, he tells us, hold onto nothing solid, either on the outside or the inside. “The important thing is to somehow keep going. This is ‘the straw to which we cling.” This credo, shared in a rare interview, could serve as caption for all of his mature paintings. [Read more…]

Albert Pinkham Ryder: White Whale of American Art

By

by Christopher Benfey

A Wild Note of Longing: Albert Pinkham Ryder and a Century of American Art
at New Bedford Whaling Museum, MA
NYR

“American history is haunted by nightbirds in the nineteenth century,” Lewis Mumford wrote in The Brown Decades, his landmark 1931 study of Gilded Age culture. Chief among these nocturnal artists, for Mumford, was the painter Albert Pinkham Ryder, who was given to long, solitary nighttime walks in Lower Manhattan. Born in 1847, Ryder was a virtuoso of turbulent moonlit skies, ships lost at sea, and nightmare images—drawn from Poe, another nightbird, among other sources—that stick like burrs in the memory. In The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse), inspired by a waiter who killed himself after making a bad wager, a skeletal figure armed with a scythe rides a pale horse, while a menacing snake monitors his progress. “One might call Ryder the Blake or the Melville or the Emily Dickinson of American painting,” Mumford mused, “and thus define, after a fashion, one or another phase of his art; but the fact is that Ryder was Ryder. Like every great artist, he belonged to that rare class of which there is only one example.” [Read more…]

Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art

By

at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC (through 31 January 2021)
Reviewed by Anna Shapiro
NYRB

The Whitney’s show, Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, is a study in revisionism, recasting the standard story so that those formerly disregarded and excluded from the canon of modern American art are instead given a place in it. Exhibitions in recent years have been doing that rewriting in accord with values newly freed from stigma, discovering or rediscovering artists who are female or non-European-American, or who simply didn’t fit the strictures of formalist Modernism. The artists in this show, however, were truly avant-garde in their social values, championing the underdogs of history when it was deeply unfashionable to do so. [Read more…]

Salman Toor’s How Will I Know and Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art

By

at Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC: Salmon Toor: How Will I Know (through 4 April 2021) and Vida Americana: Mexican Artists Remake American Art, 1925-1945 (through 31 January 2021)
Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx

In two rooms on the ground floor of the Whitney Museum, a scattering of miniature brown men frolic around the walls, choreographed by Pakistani artist Salman Toor. Some dance, some light a cigarette, others whisper. Many do nothing but offer themselves to our gaze or that of their cellphone. Salman Toor, who admits to admiring Watteau and Gainsborough, has adorned his tableaux with a whole festival of baroque imagery: undulant mustaches and hair styles, collars that almost look like lace, a loose neckerchief, a large hat largely out of place. [Read more…]

Gerhard Richter’s Solemn Yet Miraculous Retrospective, Painting After All

By

at Met Breuer, NYC (through 5 July 2020)
Reviewed by Peter Schjeldahl
The New Yorker

“Birkenau.” The dread name—of the main death facilities at Auschwitz—entitles four large abstract paintings and four full-sized digital reproductions of them in the last gallery of Painting After All, a peculiarly solemn Gerhard Richter retrospective at the Met Breuer. The works are based on four clandestine photographs that were smuggled out of the concentration camp in 1944. Two, taken from the shadowed exit of a gas chamber, show naked corpses strewn on the ground and smoke rising from bodies afire in a trench beyond them. Men in uniform stand at ease—two appear to chat—amid the shambles. Richter first saw the images in the fifties. He encountered them again in 2008 and kept the worst of them hanging in his studio in Cologne. In 2014, he projected them onto canvas and traced them. As he worked, they became illegible. The finished paintings exemplify Richter’s frequent style of densely layered, dragged pigments. They are unusually harsh in aspect, with clashing red and green, sickly whites, and grim blacks. But you’d hardly guess, by looking, their awful inspiration. [Read more…]

In Quiet Chorus: Mary Frank’s ¿Or Was It Like This? and Charles Burchfield’s Solitude

By

co-exhibiting at DC Moore Gallery, NYC (through February 8)
Reviewed by John Haber

Mary Frank is not just a visionary. Neither was Charles Burchfield, back when Modernism was just bringing art back to earth. Yet showing them together brings alive their most unearthly twentieth-century visions. Frank has always had an eye on planet earth. She studied with Max Beckmann, the artist who refused to look away from Germany in the 1930s, even after Beckmann’s exile in America. And then she studied life drawing in New York with Hans Hoffman, the teacher of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. She has stood out among artists less than half her age in a 2009 group show of Natural Histories. She returns now to painting after a decade of photography with an eye to nature – her surroundings at home in the Catskills. That return, though, marks even her most naturalistic subjects as not altogether of this world. [Read more…]

Resilience: Philip Guston In 1971

By

at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles (through January 5, 2020)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

…there’s no success like failure and failure’s no success at all
Bob Dylan
The painter’s first duty is to be free
Philip Guston

In 1970, New York City was the undisputed center of the art world and 57th street in midtown Manhattan was the epicenter of New York’s art world with its plethora of blue chip galleries. Art and theater critics reigned supreme – they could and would ruin careers with a gleeful flourish of their poison pens. When Philip Guston, acclaimed Abstract-Expressionist, showed his new large-scale paintings at Marlborough in October, 1970, he was roundly excoriated for his switch from abstract art to figuration. Not only was the work (horrors!) figurative, it was rudely cartoonish and crudely drawn. [Read more…]

The Formidable And Innovative Lee Krasner

By

Lee Krasner: Living Colour, at the Barbican Centre, London (through 1 September)
Reviewed by Christopher P Jones

Sometimes a retrospective can abbreviate an artistic life into a series of airless high-peaks without taking notice of the lower-lying ground. Lee Krasner’s exceptional exhibition, Living Colour, at the Barbican Centre in London, achieves the exact opposite. The 100 or so works on display flesh out a life with all the territory – high and low – accounted for, so that every piece lends itself towards a greater whole. In doing so, the exhibition reveals why Krasner is rightly regarded as an artist of pioneering significance, whose development from cubist collage to expressionistic vigour accounts for an important story in 20th century American art. [Read more…]

The Oozing, Undulating Forms of Lynda Benglis

By

at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles (Through December 16, 2017)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

As a legendary and enduring figure on the international art stage, Louisiana-born conceptual sculptor Lynda Benglis is renowned for crafting pained yet sensual anthropomorphic works out of melted bronze, latex, ceramics, polyurethane, and glass. Bursting into the public consciousness with her transgressive, fearless, and unforgettable nude advertisement in Artforum (the magazine refused to give her editorial space for the image) in 1974, the artist garnered much public praise and shock for posing with a dildo between her legs in order to subvert the male gaze, binary gender roles, and notions of bodily objectification. After decades of consistently producing arresting and audacious sculptures with themes of sexuality and mortality, Benglis is once again in the public eye with her current solo retrospective at Culver City’s prestigious Blum & Poe.  [Read more…]

The Sublime Enormity, And Indifference, Of Nature

By

David Molesky
at Deedee Shattuck, Westport MA
Reviewed by Robin Scher

Somewhere along the lines humanity divorced itself from nature. Fueled by industrialization, ours became a path beholden to the indomitable force of “progress.”  That was at least the way things stood until—like an unrelenting alarm clock—we woke up to the consequences wrought by this modern god. Now with words like ‘Anthropocene’ entering our common lexicon, the line between humanity and her surroundings has once again begun to blur. [Read more…]

On The Art Of Scott Burton

By

By Megan M. Garwood

No one said anything, or even guessed. Everyone waited for it, what could come after abstract expressionism, which had died alongside Jackson Pollock in a senseless, drunken car crash on August 11, 1956. There weren’t any theories on how artists could further the surface of a canvas with paint and tool. The growing meaninglessness of abstract painting merely ramified after numerous aesthetic dead ends. Unquestionably, no American painter could replace Pollock. However, what would come next didn’t need a spokesman, or a macho flâneur with an anger problem for that matter. The art world was about to explode with an androgynous art wave imbued with the spirit of Duchamp, who said: “The whole trend of painting was something I didn’t care to continue” (Tomkins, 2014, p. 100). Many artists of the next generation excoriated the canvas, turned away from the emotive and toward the cerebral. For them, experience became the creator and the artwork. [Read more…]