Christopher Taggart @ Center for Contemporary Art, Sacramento

Christopher Taggart @ Center for Contemporary Art, Sacramento

Posted on 02 February 2012

"Ta Ta", 2006 – 2011, UV-Laminated photographs, polyester, resin, fiberglass, wood pole

If you were looking for an artist who takes to heart Jasper Johns’ advice – “Do something, do something to that, and then do something to that” — Christopher Taggart would be your man. (Yes, I realize I’m recycling this quote from a recent review, but in Taggart’s case it truly applies.) Straight out of art school, Taggart achieved the art world equivalent of a moon shot by landing representation at Ace Gallery. The nine-year relationship dissolved in 2009, but the innovations that brought him there continue –a fact recognized by San Francisco dealer Eli Ridgway and by Renny Pritikin, the curator of this show, Time Fugitives. It’s a tidy but representative sampling of the Berkeley artist’s achievements to date.

Taggart makes photo collages that resemble mosaics that have been shattered and painstakingly reassembled. His sculptures, built of photographic prints, physically replicate and sometimes exaggerate – in three dimensions — the same objects he photographs. Video projections, which work hand-in-glove with wall installations, hover between surveillance and portraiture, while his photo-derived portraits on paper appear as ghosts of a sort you would not want haunting your dreams. Taggart also makes etchings on aluminum whose lines dance in mid-air, like some sort of electric filament spun into webs by a hyperkinetic insect. (This fall, a 50-foot tall example of the latter will go up at the new School of Veterinary Medicine building on the UC Davis campus.)

Taggart earned his undergraduate degree in physics, and it shows. When he started etching aluminum by hand, he realized he could automate some of the labor. He attached a compass to an electric drill. Then, to further speed the process, he wrote a computer algorithm to control the action of homemade etching device.  For the ghost series Taggart drew concentric circles whose density was determined by the tonal values found in images he downloaded from the Internet. (The darker the tonal values, the more closely packed the circles.) How Taggart determined this technique would produce images that read as human faces is as much a mystery as how he transforms physical objects into photos and then back into objects. Taggart explains it all matter-of-factly in audio blurbs you can hear in the gallery – none of which will enable you to envision yourself actually doing what he does.  
 
"Portrait of a Photographer" (with a dozen of her portraits), 2011, hand-cut UV-laminated photographs glued to board
 
Merging applied science with art, Taggart has proven himself adept at turning one thing into another. The most notable examples on view here are his photo-based sculptures. He begins by drawing triangles on objects to grid them off into sections. He photographs them over and over, progressively magnifying (or reducing) the size of the images. Arrayed over delicate armatures, the assembled images can mimic the source object as in Pigberry for Sizemore, an inflated football made of photos printed on fabric. Or, they can morph unpredictably, as in Ta-Ta, an enormous nautilus-shaped form that originated from close-up pictures of a plastic dental model. 
 
“The forms,” Taggart explains, “are a result of the photo process — the pushing and pulling that happens as the photos create their own spatial change of form.”  An even more radical example is a sculpture made with a 3-D printer, which turns scanned objects (in this case the component pieces of an old pay phone) into plastic replicas of themselves. Taggart, by progressively reducing the physical size of the output, is able to assemble from the miniaturized pieces, a sculpture shaped like a Bonzai shrub.  He likens such forms to “3-D fractals. The final shape of the piece is not determined by my decisions, but by the angles defined originally by the system itself.” Hence, the title, Filling out Forms.
 
"Kudu (in the International Style)", 2011, scribed and engraved anodized, aluminum panel
That his methods seem to be imitating biology isn’t lost on the artist. Of Pigberry, the football piece, he says: “there’s a kind of relationship to natural growth… all the little bumps and little nodules or cells seem more animal” than in the original. Through the photo/sculpture process, he observes, “pigskin becomes more animalistic when the images “stack up.” But the realization of it, “that whole chain happens after the fact. “
 
Taggart’s photo collages follow a similarly unpredictable path. The largest and most dramatic of the three on view, People Looking at People, was built from 100 photos taken from the observation deck of the Empire State Building. Taggart sliced up them up into thousands of thumbnail images and reassembled them, rotating each 45 degrees. What we see is a wall-sized blizzard of visual information that resembles a TV screen after the cable connection goes haywire.  Yet out of the pieces – fragments of heads, telescopes, guardrails, water, buildings and sky – we almost instantly assemble a coherent picture.  it’s a demonstration of how the human brain creates meaning out of chaos.  
 
Visual monkey wrenching of this sort is not a new thing. David Hockney’s photo collages injected a similar style of image confusion into the public consciousness in the 1980s, giving a filmic twist to ideas Cubism introduced in the early part of the last century, although it must be said that Taggart introduces far greater dislocations than Hockey.  Likewise, historical and contemporary analogies exist for almost everything else Taggart does – none of which detract from the quirky originality of his vision.
 
The point behind Taggart’s work, I think, is that technology, whether harnessed to art or to commercial products, will continue to erode whatever boundaries we think exist between things. Like the elements, which change from solid to liquid to gas, Taggart’s work shows that boundaries, real and imagined, will continue to remain fluid.   
–DAVID M. ROTH
 
Christopher Taggart: "Time Fugitives” @ Center for Contemporary Art, Sacramento, through February 12, 2012.  Taggart will speak about his work @ CCAS on Feb. 11 @ 3 p.m.  

 

About the author:

David M. Roth is the editor and publisher of Squarecylinder.

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Larry Bell @ Toomey Tourell

Larry Bell @ Toomey Tourell

Posted on 22 January 2012

"7.24.11", 2011, mixed media on black Arches paper, 36 x 24"

With so much renewed interest focused on Larry Bell’s glass boxes in Phenomenal, the Light-Space show at the San Diego Museum of Art, it’s easy to forget that Bell began his career as an abstract painter. Here, he reminds us of that fact with a series of perception-bending works that ask the same question he’s asked all along: what do we know and how do we know it?    

Using a Finish Fetish technique he invented years ago and continues to refine, Bell, in six “small figure collages” (2008 to 2011), reframes the age-old epistemological question. He builds multi-layered compositions from metal-coated paper and plastics which he heats in a vacuum press – a method that vaporizes the metals and preserves the compositions but eradicates evidence of their construction, like visible seams, original surface textures and the like.
 
The pictures invoke a big swath of collage and photo history, from Duchamp and Man Ray to Romare Beardon.   They prominently feature torsos, buttocks and thighs in bold juxtapositions, pitting positive and negative shapes against each other in rainbow-tinted shades of black and silver, with occasional bits of strong color. They don’t pretend to be erotic or narrative-figurative in any meaningful sense. The real subject, as it always is with Bell, is the play of light on surface. When those vaporized metals re-solidify they retain a crystalline structure that refracts light prismatically. Colors change, as do our perceptions of spatial depth. Iridescence, the one "constant", gives way to shifting hues of gold, green, red, blue and silver with the slightest change in viewing position.  What looks static at first is, in fact, completely fluid.  
 
With these pictures, Bell negates Frank Stella’s proto-Minimalist dictum (“What you see is what you see”) and  affirms Duchamp who said, “The viewer completes the work of art”.  But even that — the idea of completion — is up for grabs with Bell. As Peter Frank noted: “What you see is never only what you see.” In fact, it “may not be what you see from one moment to the next, and may not even be what is actually there.” Bell’s visual sleights of hand demonstrate how elusive and slippery our perception really is.
–DAVID M. ROTH
 
Larry Bell @ Toomey Tourell through January 31, 2012.
 
About the author:
David M. Roth is the editor and publisher of Squarecylinder.
 

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Annabeth Rosen @ Gallery Paule Anglim

Annabeth Rosen @ Gallery Paule Anglim

Posted on 20 January 2012

"Bunny", 2011, fired and glazed ceramic, steel stands, casters, baling wire, 46 x 32 x 24"
Building on the exuberant biomorphicism that catapulted her into the front rank of ceramic sculpture nearly two decades ago, Annabeth Rosen continues to expand the material and conceptual possibilities of clay. Her work, which tends to elicit strong reactions, consists of writhing, bulbous, serpentine shapes that are lashed to each other with baling wire and mounted on rolling steel chassis. Aquatic plant life and buoys and terrestrial shapes like gourds and viscera, are just a few of the associations called up by these ungainly accretions. Think of what Jules Verne might have created had he been a ceramic sculptor and you can easily picture what’s on view here; the difference being that in nature, plant and animal life this densely clustered are almost never seen except under a microscope. Rosen, a 2011 Joan Mitchell Foundation grant recipient, calls it “weaving with clay.” This quality of layering, folding, uplifting and compaction probably has more in common with geological processes than with anything biological. Rosen’s brilliance lies in her ability to fuse the two. It’s a trait that has held steady across her career, encompassing a cast of mutant (and ever-mutating) forms which she fabricates serially by hand.
 
 
What’s new, at least to my eye, is the increasingly anthropomorphic twist her works have taken.  Rosen achieves this quality by first, mounting the component parts on metal dollies so that they stand upright; and second, by attaching elongated gourd-like forms and buoy-shaped wire nets stuffed with clay scraps. The latter protrude outward, like errant “limbs” or malignancies. Adding to the figurative allusions are painted patterns that resemble bodily decorations, African-influenced textile and vessel patterning and outsized forms that replicate internal organs — like the enormous green “heart” that rests atop Bunny, its severed “tubing” bringing to mind Aztec sacrificial rites. 
 
"Talley", 2011, fired and glazed ceramic, steel stands and 2" casters and steel baling wire, 45 x 25 x 24"
If all this sounds violent, well, it is. David Cohen, writing in Artcritical, attributed this to Rosen’s history of watching television cartoons as a child, and later living in rough neighborhoods as a young artist in New York and Philadelphia. Rosen acknowledges as much, but says her current work is more rooted in the move she made in 1997 to accept the Robert Arneson Endowed Chair at UC Davis. (She’s since been included in practically every major museum survey on the topic you can think of, including Overthrown, boundary-stretching exhibit last year at the Denver Art Museum.) About Davis, Rosen is fond of saying: “I spent more time outdoors in my first year there than I did in my entire life before that.” Gardening became an obsession, plant life a key theme.  When the Twin Towers fell, New York, her native city, reasserted its grip. Rosen’s color palette literally turned ashen, evidence of which can still be seen in Bollo, a waist-high assemblage topped by grayish vessel-shaped forms that spill out from the wheeled support structure. Strangely, this anomalous mechanical feature of her work injects levity: simple shifts in the orientation of the wheels seem to effect “personality” or “mood” changes in the pieces themselves.
 
That we can attribute such qualities to inanimate objects seems crazy until you consider the medium itself: mud. Unlike paint, which, for a spell, was emptied of its tactile qualities by theorists who exerted undue influence, clay has resisted all such efforts.  It remains what it’s always been: a maximally expressive material. Rosen remains at the forefront of artists who are enlarging its emotive possibilities.  Her new work feels totemic and talismanic.
–DAVID M. ROTH
 
Annabeth Rosen: “New Work” @ Gallery Paule Anglim through January 28, 2012.
 
About the author:
David M. Roth is the editor and publisher of Squarecylinder.  

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One Thing Leads to Another @ ICA

One Thing Leads to Another @ ICA

Posted on 17 January 2012

Christel Dillbohner (detail), "Polar Journeys", monoprints, each 15 x 15" 
 
Jasper Johns’ famous quip, “Do something, do something to that, and then do something to that” wasn’t just a personal credo; it was a valid observation about how large chunks of 20th century art – from Dada and Fluxus to Pop and Minimalism – were made by following self-invented rules and rituals. They are the basis of One Thing Leads to Another, a show of 13 artists who devise unique, repetitive methods to create works on paper that address themes of nature, spirituality, memory, chance, endurance and the absurd.
 
While some works in this conceptually driven show feel like simple process experiments (and, in one instance, a precisely controlled science project), it’s displays of genuine material invention that register the strongest.  Chief among the latter is Polar Journeys, Christel Dillbohner’s series of 28 monoprints, made while she was an artist-in-residence at the ICA Print Center. It shows how repetition, when applied with diligence, craft and imagination, can yield work that goes beyond anything you might associate with a rote mechanical exercise. Dillbohner prints three different photographic images (of a sailboat, a mountain, and a tower-mounted industrial tank) on five different paper stocks with two printmaking techniques.  The result is a giant dreamscape.  The images alternate between representation and abstraction, romancing antiquity with surface textures that recall early 19th century photo processes.
 
Robin Kandel (detail) "The 24-Hour Drawing Project"
Fanny Retsek, who directs the ICA’s printmaking facility, foregoes mechanical reproduction in Troops on the Ground. It’s a dyptich that looks like scarified skin, the result of burning the paper 150,000 times with a soldering iron; each tiny incision represents an American soldier sent to Iraq.  It’s not a memorial, exactly, but it feels like one.  Robin Kandel’s The 24-hour Drawing Project is also something of an endurance test.  Her self-issued challenge was to rotate a ruler in a circular pattern and draw a pencil line every sixteenth of an inch. The leaf shapes she drew on card stock every 10 to 15 minutes are arrayed on a long table.  They appear remarkably consistent, defying the expectation that the lines get sloppier as the artist gets sleepier.  
 
Op, a movement that peaked in the mid-‘60s, relied heavily on serial methods, is well represented here. Amy Ellingson, well known for injecting fresh life into Op through hand-worked computer designs, asks us to detect subtle changes in a group of arch-shaped motifs that repeat throughout a cycle of drawings called 50 Variations.  In it, she trades her color-saturated palette for a silvery monochrome, a subtraction that makes this series particularly enignmatic. Anthony Ryan goes all-out for color by weaving together in tight grids, strips of thinly cut paper culled from cast-off product packages. The colors are identical to the test patterns seen on printers’ proofs, and with them Ryan delivers a full-on sensory assault. His interlocking patterns plunge us into a frenetic search for visual stability that the pictures deny, mirroring the neural agitation that comes from too much time spent staring at electronic devices. Linn Myers, with virtually no color, sows another kind visual confusion, one with spiritual overtones. Her drawings consist of mandala-like shapes which, when passed through a press, take on even greater complexity; they resemble organic-looking versions of Victor Vasarely’s spherical grid paintings.  Theodora Varnay Jones, a minimalist with a history of serial expression, steps out of character by giving herself the task of transforming a crumpled sheet of paper.  She does it by superimposing line drawings over a shadowy photo of the object.  The effect is almost holographic.
 
 
Amy Ellingson (detail), "50 Variations", gouache on paper

 

Brad Brown plays with chance.  He defaces his drawings in every conceivable way, and then rolls dice to decide how he’ll treat the printing plates. These he slices up and instructs press operators to arrange however they like.  The results are surprisingly consistent – and funny, like what Philip Guston might have come up with had he drawn abstract cartoon panels. Sculptor Mari Andrews makes casual drawings at the end of each workday. From this habit of improvising around nature-based themes, she selected 55 pieces and arranged them in a large grid.  None are particularly remarkable, nor are they intended to be; but in series, they unfold slowly and cinematically, like giant flip cards, encouraging meditation on the natural cycles that are her subject. 

Fanny Retsek, (Detail) "Troops on the Ground"

Things to Say to Dinner Guests, Kim Rugg’s serial “white-out” of every letter in the alphabet – executed A-through-Z across 23 copies of a single edition The New York Times – is an engaging spoof. It looks like a ransom note or, alternately, a bizarre exercise in linguistic analysis, but it is neither.  It reminds me of Joseph Heller’s send up of wartime censorship in Catch-22 where soldiers get letters from home that begin with “Dear” and end in “Love” — with nothing in between.

With nearly a century of history behind it, you’d think process art of this sort would be exhausted.   But that would be like saying that art itself is exhausted. Fact is, serial actions underpin some of the most important art of the past century, from Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone music to Andy Warhol’s silk-screened multiples.  The reason, I suspect, is that rule-based art making embodies and reconciles our contradictory desire for freedom and structure.   One Thing Leads to Another doesn’t reframe or reinterpret that legacy. It simply reaffirms seriality’s vitality as a guiding principle.
 
–DAVID M. ROTH
 
“One Thing Leads to Another” @ the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art through Feb. 25, 2012.
 
Photos: David Pace
 
About the author:

David M. Roth is the editor and publisher of Squarecylinder.  

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Soil to Site @ Montalvo

Soil to Site @ Montalvo

Posted on 05 January 2012

Sean McFarland: "Untitled (grove)", 2011, C-print, 40 x 80"

 

Given the insults we’ve inflicted on the planet, is it any wonder we have difficulty re-creating a Walden-like experience? Soil to Site, the final installment in an 18-month cycle of events titled Natural and Creative Capitol, examines the always-fraught relationship between man and nature. It features three Bay Area artists who lean toward the Edenic, but who also openly acknowledge the challenges facing anyone who seeks to establish a deep relationship with what today passes for wilderness. 

If there’s a through-line running through the exhibit it’s that wilderness exists purely at our pleasure, and it does so only through acts of human beneficence, not acts of God.  Sean McFarland, a highly skilled simulation artist, has a strategy for negotiating this skewed state of affairs. His collaged photos, based on images that he collects and digitally reconstructs, are designed to operate like dioramas, re-creating “facts” of natural history by fictionalizing them. Crepuscular and hermetic and alternating between medium-sized C-Prints and tiny (3/1/2 x 4/14”) Polaroids, they make the familiar seem strange and the strange seem familiar. The five prints on view here come from two series, Dark Pictures (2011) and Pictures of the Earth (2009-11). 

McFarland: "Lightning", 2010, Polaroid, 3 1/4 x 4 1/4

They make you feel as if you’re staring through a keyhole into art history. Impenetrably dark foliage, broad vistas, pristine waterfalls, lightening and other primordial aspects of the Earth recall photo-graphy’s 19th century beginnings and its ongoing dialog with American and European Romantic painting of the same period. McFarland integrates these elements into fakes that are wholly plausible, but not so perfect as to make you think you’re looking at a “straight” photograph. 

As such, they’re apt metaphors for his belief that our perception of the Earth is altered by everything we’ve done to it (and everything we haven’t.) If that comes off sounding too much like the postmodern cliché about the relativity of everything, so be it. The longer you look at these pictures the more apparent it becomes that they are not just simple exercises in visual destabilization but, rather, subtle pleas for the exercise of consciousness.

So, too, is Mari Andrews’ installation of dirt-filled lead pouches, Collected Topography. Spread across a wall, the individual pouches appear as mundane objects – until you look inside them and see that the soil, harvested from 29 locations across the West, is incredibly diverse in color and texture. 
 
Mari Andrews: "Collected Topography", 2011, lead, soil, wire
Dirt, no matter how rich or how finely tilled, never triggers anything approaching an epiphany in me, but it does here. Andrews succeeds by doing the opposite of what she does normally, which is to create sculptures built of poetic materials (twigs, branches, seed pods and lichen) that, once installed in galleries, feel drained of whatever poetry their raw materials may have once had. In contrast, dirt, which has zero aesthetic value, overflows with it when presented out of context. It doesn’t hurt, either, that Andrews uses lead, a toxic material, as a container for her excavations; it gives the installation a critical edge, highlighting the contradiction between our professed reverence for the natural world and our continued abuse of it.
 
In Hierarchy of Relevance, a 7-minute video, the Britain-born San Francisco artist Richard T. Walker films himself serenading inanimate objects (shrubs, rocks and mountains and trees) against a series of stunning desert backdrops. In a voiceover that precedes his performance on various instruments, Walker delivers a monologue that describes his existential dilemma. “He looked again at the immediate surroundings in the hope that he would no longer see them with such excessive clarity. But he couldn’t escape their individual wonder. He desperately needed a distraction. His thoughts began to meander, confused and agitated, unsure where to land. But slowly they started to calm, eventually culminating and floating into a short melody that glossed over the moment.”   Unable to meet his self-imposed challenge, he does what he can: he sings, strums a guitar and beats a drum. Ultimately, as he explains in the video, it was the song that “briefly set him free.” 
 
Richard T. Walker, "The Hierarchy of Relevance", 2010, still from 8-min video
 
Like the British writer John Berger, who walked across Europe wondering what horrors the land beneath his feet may have witnessed, Walker, with self-deprecating good humor, wanders the wilderness trying to rise to the task of comprehending the grandeur before him. That he’ll fail is a foregone conclusion; whatever state of grace he needs simply cannot be mustered. But its unavailability, the Soil to Site artists seem to be saying, doesn’t matter. The important thing that we keep trying. How?  The show offers no quick fixes, no redemptive path.  You can sing to rocks, as Walker does. Or, you can do what I do: take a good long walk in the woods that lay just beyond the gallery walls – on the 175-acre parcel  of land deeded to the public trust in 1930 by California’s first popularly elected U.S. Senator, James Phelan (1861-1930), a philanthropically minded politician who understood the soul-enriching properties of open space.   
–DAVID M. ROTH
"Soil to Site" @ Montalvo Arts Center through January 15, 2011.
 
About the Author:
David M. Roth is the editor and publisher of Squarecylinder. 

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Hadi Tabatabai @ Brian Gross

Hadi Tabatabai @ Brian Gross

Posted on 19 December 2011

“Thread Painting 2011-11”, 2011, thread, acrylic paint and ABS on Dibond, 54 × 50 × 3/4"

In his delicate combinations of squares, rectangles and floating lines, Hadi Tabatabai makes a strong case for the ongoing vitality of the minimalist credo: that by neutralizing the ego ambitions of the artist and by eliminating all forms of extraneous visual noise viewers can become aware of their own perceptions.  It’s a time-tested, high-Modernist formulation that connects the seeming opposites of science and religion, logic and belief, craft and high art. By ratcheting his own practice of it up to a level of asceticism and obsession that would have even Agnes Martin smiling, the Iran-born Berkeley artist scores a significant victory in the realm of optical illusionism.

 
The seven multi-panel monochromatic (black-against-grey) paintings on view range from small to medium-sized.  He builds them by stretching lengths of thread over painted panels, so that what we see are lines laid down on top of other lines — all of which appear to reside at indeterminate depths. They sow visual confusion about boundaries — between surface and background and about how the works themselves are made. The animating visual conundrum is how seemingly unmoored tendrils of thread can appear to lay on the surfaces of the pictures without falling away.  The artist creates this illusion by painting certain lengths the exact same color as the backgrounds. Those demarcations between light and dark colors create geometric shapes that are, at least from across a room, the ostensible subjects. But the more interesting aspect is the illusion of infinite depth that we experience while looking into these spaces.
 
“Thread Painting # 35”, 2010, wood, thread and acrylic paint on plywood, 17 1/8 × 33 3/8 × 1”
 
The macro view of Tabatabai’s pictures suggests close ties to classic minimalists like Martin and John McLaughlin. The close-up view, which brings us face to face with their optical characteristics, suggests affinities with the Light and Space movement. Admittedly, light, by itself, is a bit player in these hermetic pictures, but the sensations of spatial dislocation that strike us right at the edge of perception are the same ones that occupy the imaginations of James Turrell and Robert Irwin.  If Tabatabai made his paintings ten times bigger they’d register the same kind of impact as Turrell’s and Irwin’s.  As is, they operate mostly in a liminal zone, their plastic activity taking place within a depth of an inch or less.  

 

It’s notable, and perhaps no surprise, that before he became an artist, Tabatabai studied construction engineering. At a vastly reduced scale, his work reflects the same concerns with bodily space that architects strive for when they design a building. 
 
Thread Painting 2011-1, 2011, 48 × 40 5/8”
You can see it in the precise lines of Thread Painting # 35 where, at the bottom, the strings are glued together to create a delicate web whose matrices recall suspension bridges. Those lines, which are precisely spaced and exactingly painted, also bring to mind both stringed instruments and the endlessly repeating rhythmic cycles of Philip Glass. Thread Painting 2011-11, by contrast, presents rhythmic chaos masked as order.  The largest piece in the show, at 54 x 50 inches, it consists of nine panels that display four squares. Each is divided across four panels which, in turn, subdivide those squares even further. The most obvious associations are to windows, doors, recesses and porticoes. But instead of looking at this geometry lesson from a point-blank position. stand back.  After a few seconds the relationships between “positive” and “negative” space start to dissolve and soon it becomes difficult distinguish between them.
 
For most artists, creating work like this would be a migraine-inducing cerebral process.  For this artist it’s an act of devotion, a meditation. 
 
As he told works & conversations editor Richard Whittaker in a 2008 interview: “When you look at something small…it brings you closer to yourself….Whereas most things just bring you out into the world. I think it’s much more important to come back to ourselves, to understand. I’m interested in the point of origin: where is it as human beings that we connect with each other.”
 
–DAVID M. ROTH
Hadi Tabatabai: “Portals” through December 23, 2011 @ Brian Gross Fine Art.
 
About the author:
David M. Roth is the editor and publisher of Squarecylinder.

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Shows & Waterston @ Haines

Shows & Waterston @ Haines

Posted on 14 December 2011

Shows: "Face K" 

This pairing of virtuosos is, without question, the painting event of 2011. It captures Shows, a peerless collagist, at a breakthrough moment, and Waterston, an established master, at the peak of his powers, extending his prodigious skills in a fresh series of small-scale paintings complimented by a stunning piece of high-Goth sculpture. Both artists employ landscape but their intentions and orientations couldn’t be more diverse.  

Shows pursues a vision of the Earth’s geologic past in cycles of creation and destruction viewed from some indefinite point in the future, one in which humankind’s destructive sashay across the planet is but a footnote, a trail of insignificant debris. Waterston paints lush, intricately rendered dreamscapes in a style that betrays the twin influences of the Hudson River School and the Edo Period (1603–1867) of Japanese painting. Where Shows takes a cosmological view of things, compressing eons into sprawling epics, Waterston, in his canvases, is all about seeing one’s own mortality in the face of nature, an essentially Neo-Romantic view to which he adds a postmodern spin.
 
Of the two artists, Shows, in this exhibition, has traveled the furthest since her last big splash, back in 2006, when she won the SECA award and knocked everyone out who saw the accompanying show at SFMOMA. This time, instead of depicting vast tracts of mine-ravaged land in wall-sized collages made of cut paper, she’s focused her attention more narrowly on the booty itself: minerals, a topic the SF artist knows well from having grown up in Alaska. In Split Array minerals aren’t just the artist’s subject, they are her source material and raw material. It’s a stunning bit of mimesis.
 
Detail: "Face K", 2011, ink, acrylic, mylar, sand, canvas, plastic, engraving, 82 x 48" 
The eight large-scale pictures on view are based on scans of fist-size chunks of pyrite (aka “fool’s gold”) whose “faces” convincingly mimic the features of exotic landscapes. These she copies onto large sheets of aluminum using a mixture of paper, mylar, paint, mica, brass, plastic, ground rock, sand, ink, plexiglass crushed glass and other materials.  The resulting collages are as painterly as they are sculptural. At a distance their primordial features (chasms, fissures, glaciers, ridges, oceans, magma flows) jump out at you like topography in an aerial photograph. Close up they flatten out, like paintings. Don’t bother trying to visually disassemble them. The illusions produced by Shows’ seamless integration of materials is so complete you’d think she was working from a palette of molten ore. The resulting fictional universe, built of colliding geometric planes and quavering molten forms, flips back and forth between earthly and otherworldly. Reflective materials and scratchings on the aluminum substrate function as the equivalent of photographic highlights. They amplify the sci-fi aspect, pushing some pictures, like Face E, practically into Surrealism. Staring into its mirrored horizontal bands, you think you’re looking “through” the picture onto an infinite pool of light until you see your own reflection.
 
Installation view: "Sulfur"
This piece of opacity serves as convenient metaphor for what has always been the slipperiest aspect of Shows’ work: her thinly veiled environmental agenda. Like the photographer Edward Burtynsky to whom she’s been compared, Shows is a master of wresting beauty from toxicity. Her work, which isn’t the least bit didactic, relies on a subtle presentation of evidence to guide viewers into recognizing their own complicity in the processes she pictures. She does it here with a pile of consumer waste strewn across the floor. The most significant aspect of this unsightly display of faux toys and electronic gadgets is that the objects are cast in sulfur.  Sulfur, it should be noted, has actual value, whereas the subject of the paintings, pyrite, does not. It’s within that contradiction — between beauty and ugliness, value and worthlessness – that we experience the essential frission of Shows’ art: a pitch-perfect integration of craft, concept and understated ideological purpose.  The seminal German collagist Kurt Schwitters (1997-1948) once boasted (correctly) that he could make “paintings” out of anything. In Split Array, Shows proves, once again, that she can too, using pure abstraction to serve the needs of representation.
 
Waterston, by contrast, sticks mostly to conventional materials: paint, paper, canvas and wood. While the scenes he paints shifts with each body of work, Waterston remains committed, in his bravura technique, to depicting environments that look as if they were conceived in a tropical hothouse and painted as if the artist were looking at the world through the window of a spacecraft or a submarine.  This produces a certain detached feeling, but it’s consistently overshadowed by a stronger sense of engagement telegraphed by hot colors, dense atmospherics and disorienting perspectives, often combined in single paintings. A veteran explorer of the Kantian notion of the sublime, Theosophy and Eastern traditions, Waterston, in Forest Eater, takes us to the volcanoes of Hawaii in 24 small-scale works that are intimately displayed in the gallery’s back room alongside a remarkable pedestal-mounted sculpture.
 
Waterston: "Magma Study", 2010, watercolor on paper, 6 x 12"
 
For Waterston, who for years has trained his eye on the infinite cycle of rebirth and death, the volcano is a perfect subject. Regurgitating the Earth’s very core, volcanoes remake the surface of the planet through violent, toxic eruptions that cloud the sky and spew rivers of molten rock. Waterston captures the primordial spectacle of it all: the fiery explosions, the steaming fissures and so forth. His depictions of it in watercolors, which fill one wall, reveal a mastery of Asian techniques: stains, ghostly impressions and misty skies and other signifiers of the ineffable.  In contrast, his oil paintings, on an opposing wall, are more specific. Flow and Schwarzwald No. 1, both heavily impastoed, describe molten lava in a texture that resembles wet tar. It drips off the canvases. 
"Pahoehoe (flow)", 2011, paint, wood, metal, plastic, 55 x 50 x 40"
A similar literalness operates in Pahoehoe (flow), a pedestal mounted sculpture made of paint, plastic, metal and wood that looks like a lava flow cast in styrofoam. The biomorophic/grotesque aesthetic of it provides humorous counterpoint to the studied lyricism of everything else, including Waterston’s now-trademark silhouettes, several of which poignantly capture the visual cacophony of unearthed trees. 
 
Waterston may look east for inspiration, but what I get out of his paintings is something akin to the existential dread that pervades Southern novels. I’m not saying there’s a telltale heart beating inside his canvases, only that the artist is exercising some serious mojo.  As Waterston told FAMSF curator Timothy Anglin Burgard: “Painting is the great accomplishment of alchemy.  Paint itself holds the possibility of meaning waiting to signify.” 
 
If that’s the case — and how could it not be? — Shows and Waterston are definitely performing some serious acts of signification, the likes of which are everywhere to be seen but too seldom realized at such a high level. 
# # #
 
–DAVID M. ROTH
 
Leslie Shows in conversation with Larry Rinder @ Haines Gallery: Wednesday, Dec. 14 @ 5:30-7:30 p.m.
 
Leslie Shows: “Split Array” and Darren Waterston: “Forest Eater” @ Haines Gallery through December 24, 2012.
 
Photos: Monique Deschaines/Haines Gallery
 
About the author:
David M. Roth is the editor and publisher of Squarecylinder.

 

 

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Rex Slinkard @ Cantor Arts Center

Rex Slinkard @ Cantor Arts Center

Posted on 09 December 2011

"Rex" , c. 1914-1915, oil on canvas. 34 x 29-1/2"

Whenever anyone’s life is cut short, our thoughts go immediately to what might have been. Often our perceptions of a person’s promise are hastily stitched together by whatever shreds of evidence seem handy—little Jimmy’s love of airplanes suggested a future as a pilot; Suzie’s fondness for animals certainly could have been the first step toward a satisfying career as a veterinarian.

But when painter Rex Slinkard at the age of 31 during the influenza epidemic of 1918, he left behind an actual body of work for our examination. That the former rancher was an artist has never been the issue. The question was, and still is, would he have become a great one?
 
The Legend of Rex Slinkard, through February 26, 2012, at Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center, does not definitively answer that question, despite the 60 paintings and works on paper on view. Culled from Stanford’s trove of 268 pieces by Slinkard, the show is accompanied by a comprehensive catalog, with excellent essays by Charles C. Eldredge, who is a scholar of Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Mardsen Hartley, and Geneva Gano, whose research on Slinkard was a catalyst for Legend.
 
By all accounts, Slinkard did not hit his stride as an artist until 1914. Because he entered the Army in 1917, Slinkard’s “mature” period spans barely four years. As the Great War raged in Europe, Slinkard indulged his infatuation with self-portraiture, as well as his symbolist urgings, creating allegorical works that appear lifted from the exteriors of Greek amphora and urns. Numerous paintings here containing sections, anyway, that are quite handsome and polished, but if this is the best of what remains of Slinkard’s legend, as Mardsen Hartley coined the phrase, one is forgiven for wondering what all the fuss is about.
 
Indeed, after Slinkard died, his father thought so little of his son’s output that he used Slinkard’s early, life-size portraits to fence in his chickens. I wouldn’t have done that with the stiff self-portrait from 1910 that’s on view, but you can imagine how hard-working dad might have been impatient with the career choice of his son. In that painting, Slinkard faces himself, standing posed and formal in a white shirt and dark vest, wearing a bow tie that’s as prominent as his bushy eyebrows. To his father, Slinkard’s paintings must have been uncomfortable reminders that young Rex was a city-slicker intellectual.
 
"Ring Idols", c. 1915–1916, oil on canvas, 26 x 30"
Or, in papa Slinkard’s estimation, worse. As devoted as Slinkard may have been to his art, he also liked to have a good time, drinking and carousing during his days in New York, where he studied under Ashcan artist Robert Henri and shared a studio with George Bellows, who put Slinkard in the lower foreground of one of his most famous fight paintings, Stag at Sharkey’s (1909). Some years later, in 1915, Slinkard’s own depiction of boxers, Ring Idols, was even more obviously homoerotic than Stag, which may be one reason why Rex’s father thought his son’s art was literally for the birds, or why young Slinkard’s engagement to Gladys Williams never consummated in marriage.
 
By 1914, Slinkard’s facial features (he was a cross between James Dean and Leonardo DiCaprio) and wardrobe are disappearing from his canvases, as if even he’s not sure what to make of his primary subject. Rex (1914-1915) is all shades of brown and ochre, a ghost-like phantom staring through narrow eyes, which create a horizon line on which the tangerine-colored flower blooms faintly in the artist’s forehead. Acolyte-Self-Portrait, (1914-1916), is brighter for the white shirt and red collar against a brownish background, but is that a rose or a beating heart in the artist’s apparently clasped hands? Is it anything at all? For self-portraits, these pictures are stubbornly obtuse.
 
Nor are we on firmer ground when Slinkard leaves his studio to paint landscapes, which are peopled with young men and boys in embrace, lean Elie Nadelman-like horses, and allegorical scenes of floods and fountains that borrow heavily from Arthur Davies but suggest the sensibility of William Blake. This is the Slinkard that Eldredge describes as a “latter-day Transcendentalist with a brush.” It’s a good line, but whether it’s a compliment or acknowledgement of Slinkard’s ultimate failure as an artist is difficult to say. 
 
"Wild Horses (Red)", 1914–15, oil on canvas, 24 x 27-7/8"
In the catalog, poet Marianne Moore is quoted, saying that Slinkard’s work was “so good and so hampered,” but by what, precisely? Though he apparently valued imagination over mere technique or convention, I think it was actually a lack of imagination that was Slinkard’s Achilles heel. After his death, his supportive mom, who saw to it that her son’s fiancée got the bulk of his work (Gladys died just a few years after Slinkard, leaving the legacy to her sister Florence, who then left it to her alma mater), tried to keep her son’s complicated legend simple. “He was fond of horses and dogs,” she said. In fact, Slinkard painted a lot of horses during his short career, but if his horse paintings had been consigned to the family chicken coop, would his mother’s words have caused us to bemoan the loss of a promising young large-animal vet? Perhaps. But the real question that remains unanswered by the evidence is whether Slinkard would have achieved greatness had his life not ended too soon.
 
-BEN MARKS
 
“The Legend of Rex Slinkard” @ the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, through February 26, 2012.
 
About the Author:
Ben Marks is the senior editor of CollectorsWeekly.com and a contributor to KQED.org.
 
 

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Peter Wayne Lewis @ JAYJAY

Peter Wayne Lewis @ JAYJAY

Posted on 08 December 2011

“Beijing Booster 601”, 2009, a/c on linen 85 X 72”
The relationship between jazz and abstract painting is longstanding. The infatuation began in the ’20s, when European Modernists embraced New Orleans jazz and Swing and then blossomed at mid-century when Abstract Expressionists fell head-over-heels for Bebop. That the affair continues, unabated and global, testifies to the potency of cross-disciplinary influences. No other art form has had as strong an influence on painting as jazz. 
 
Which is why, when I learned about Peter Wayne Lewis, my antennae went up.  He, too, claims a connection between jazz and painting, and, at times, he comes credibly close to making it concrete. It happens in loose, wide-open gestural paintings whose form, substance and structure hew to the same principles that govern jazz: namely, elastic expression within set structures. For the chord progressions of jazz Lewis substitutes wavy geometric grids, some visible, others implied. These he creates with brush-painted lines whose squiggly contours recall Sumi ink painting, both in their gradations of luminosity and in their balance of spontaneity and precise control, the latter exemplified in the arabesques he spins with a wrist flick in the middle or at the end of long flowing lines. Using the same technique, he also peppers his canvases with small paint dabs that have the upturned-nipple shape of chocolate “kisses”. There are also in his works highly diluted stains like those seen in Asian watercolors.  In his modulation of these elements, Lewis proves himself a master of rhythm, a kind of off-kilter rhythm, achieved through bodily intuition, not careful plotting. Like the skittering grooves of Thelonius Monk which, by themselves, would have little context or impact without accompaniment, it’s the edges of the canvas that contain Lewis’ fluid compositions and give them coherence. In pictures ranging in size from 30 x 22 inches to 7 x 6 feet, he skirts representation almost entirely, a rare thing in abstract painting no matter what the method or intent.  
 
Beijing Booster 601, the boldest of the large paintings, has a gushing, roiling celebratory quality; it unfurls before the eye like a ticker-tape parade revealed in paint. Working at smaller scales, as in Beijing Booster 513, Lewis allows oozing biomorphic forms to stand almost naked.
 
(L to R): "Beijing Booster 508, 507, 513", 2009-2011, a/c on linen, all 30 x 22"
 
 
A Jamaican-American who emigrated to Sacramento in 1962 and then moved to New York after earning an MA in art at San Jose State, Lewis, 58, leads a peripatetic existence that rivals that of any globe circumnavigating musician. He divides his time between a home in South Orange, N.J., a job in Boston teaching painting at the Massachusetts College of Art and a studio in Beijing. Contrary to what you might imagine, the latter has not darkened his sunny pallete or injected politics into his work. Lewis mostly remains tethered to his own history, and, more than anything else, to his own psycho-motor impulses, some of which may be genetically encoded: His father was an accomplished jazz pianist; his grandparents were missionaries. His friends include the jazz-influenced poet Amiri Baraka, as well as many New York-area musicians.
 
“Beijing Booster 600”, 2009, a/c on linen 85 X 72”
Like the jazz legends who recorded for Blue Note, Prestige and Impulse at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in nearby Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Lewis completes all of his works in a single take without revision.  He titles and numbers them sequentially. What you see is an exact record of how each painting was made.  Thus, any “holes” in a series correspond to paintings the artist rejected rather than rework. The downside to this “first-thought, best-thought” approach is that some paintings feel underdeveloped and, at times a bit glib, as if the artist tossed them off a little too quickly. The counterargument made by the exhibition is that the smaller paintings are designed to be seen in series, and it’s a valid point:  In trios, they generate a certain interactive spark.
 
Lewis is fond of citing Coltrane and Ellington as inspirations.  I see a more accurate (and far less dense analog) in guitarist Bill Frisell, a minimalist who says as much with “active” empty space as he does with actual played notes. Lewis does the same thing with well-aimed gestures and lots of white space. What we get in these light-drenched, tropically colored paintings are works that invite viewers “inside” without demanding a big down payment in visual literacy – or a large investment in decoding arcane iconographies. In jazz, they call it accessibility. In visual art it’s called Pop. Or, in Lewis’ case, you might call it a kind of Minimalist/Pop/Abstraction – one that reflects historical antecedents, but isn’t weighed down by them. 
–DAVID M. ROTH
# # #
 
Peter Wayne Lewis: “Paintings from Middle Earth” @ JAYJAY through Dec. 23, 2011.
 
About the author:
David M. Roth is the editor and publisher of Squarecylinder. A veteran journalist, he is a former contributing editor at Artweek and a critic for Art Ltd.

 

 

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Masters of Venice @ de Young Museum

Masters of Venice @ de Young Museum

Posted on 04 December 2011

Andrea Mantegna, "Saint Sebastian", 1457-1459, tempera on panel
 
 Do you ever get that feeling that the world of contemporary art is nothing more than an endless blizzard of pretense and triviality? If you don’t, then you are probably not paying attention, but if you do, then you might want to fortify yourself with a vivid reminder of better things made in a better place at a better time. The time and place is the Venetian Republic of the late 15th and early-to-middle 16th century, and the better things are the collection of 50 Venetian paintings from that period that are included in Masters of Venice: Renaissance Paintings of Passion and Power at the de Young Museum until February 12. All of the works are on loan from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and most came into that collection from the holdings of the Hapsburg Emperor Leopold II (1747-1792), an avid and judicious collector of Venetian art.
 
The late 15th and 16th centuries are often called the Venetian Golden Age, and were analogous to earlier developments in Florence during the 14th century. Both eras could be called renaissances (that being the French word for “rebirth”), but for somewhat different reasons on account of the fact that Venice was much more devastated by the Black Plague of 1348-51 than any other city in Europe. In the case of Florence, what was reborn was the conquest of pictorial space enacted under the terms of a precise perspectival system that allowed Aristotelian flesh to be placed on the Christian/Platonic ideal of a universal theocentric order. In Venice, what was reborn was the classical idea of the autonomous secular subject, this owing much to the fact that Venice was the first modern principality in Europe to adapt a systematic political separation of church and state, and also to that city’s status as a cosmopolitan crossroads between southern Italy, northern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. While Spain, Portugal, England and France sought colonial possession in Africa and the Americas, Venetian war fleets extended their influence eastward, focusing on profitable trade rather than territorial acquisition, enriching their city in the bargain. Indeed, during its golden era, Venice was both a mercantile and maritime empire that perfectly balanced the seemingly contradictory demands of church and state. Even though its political decision-making apparatus was more-or-less free of priestly interference, it also had and continues to have more churches per square mile than any other city in the world.
 
Of the 50 works in this exhibition, only 13 address ecclesiastical themes, and only one of these rises to the status of a showstopper. That painting is Andrea Mantegna’s Saint Sebastian (1459), and despite its tiny size, it is a breathtaking gem of high renaissance figuration that beautifully inflects a martyr’s suffering with a noble pathos. Truth be told, Mantegna lived most of his life in Mantua and not Venice, but since he was born near Padua and related to the family of Giovanni Bellini by marriage, the welcome addition of his work to this exhibition is given some thematic legitimacy. It also offers a valuable point of contrast, in that its crisp classical composure is so distinctly different from the sumptuous atmospherics and rich painterly luster of the latter Venetian painters.
 
Titian, “Danaë”, ca. 1560, oil on canvas
On the subject of painterly luster, this show features two reclining female nudes by Titian, each of which draws out the psychological equation of oil paint with flesh that has always lurked amidst the history of painting. They are Danäe (1554) and Nymph and Shepherd painted in 1575 near the end of the master’s long life.  Both feature figures with alabaster skin tones that are almost incandescent in their inner illumination, made up of translucent layers of multiple colors. The figures portrayed are comfortable with their own incarnation, at once confident of their status as objects contained within the space of their pictorial compositions and also as subjects that neither resist nor plead with the viewer.  All bespeak a uniquely Venetian ideal of beauty that was luxuriant, carnal and worldly, celebrated at a time when the tensions between the protestant north and counter-reformation south of Europe had started to create ideological imperatives that would soon poison most of the art of made in other parts of Europe.  No painter would come close to painting the female nude with as much elegance and conviction as did Titian for the next 100 years, and even then, when Rubens arrived on the scene, the results were relatively clownish.
 
Titian, "Portrait of Johann Frederich Elector of Saxony", ca.1548-1551
There are 25 portraits in this exhibition, and their sitters comprise a remarkable cast of characters that seem much larger than life. For example, in Tintoretto’s 1571 picture titled Portrait of Sebastiano Vernier (and the Battle of Lepanto), we see a no-nonsense military commander posed against a battle scene commemorating the decisive defeat of the Turkish navy in that fateful year, while Titian gives us the telling image of the avaricious merchant in his Portrait of Jacopo Strada (1568). There are several paintings that portray dignified ladies wearing fine and elaborate garments, the most amazing of which is Titian’s Portrait of Isabella d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua (1536). As a display of virtuoso painting skill, this work is beyond stunning, especially in the areas where Titian lingers on the details of lace and fabric, making a seemingly impossible task of descriptive representation look easy and graceful. In his Portrait of of Johann Fredrich, Elector of Saxony (1551), we are given evidence of German-speaking political emissaries in elite Venetian social circles, this one a corpulent and suspicious looking character who actually did some hard time in the ducal dungeon. And, as a reminder that several works by Veronese are also included here, I’d recommend you look closely at his portrait of Lucretia (1582), a sumptuous feast of undulating surfaces that fold in and out of the garments worn by the legendary woman of suicidal virtue.
 
Again, what comes into view is the perfect pictorial synthesis of an actual person with the type that he or she is supposed to represent. None of them face the void of mortality in the way that Rembrandt did in his late self-portraits, but then again, none of them are the passive and placid objects of blithe adoration that we see in Florentine portraits from the late 15th and 16th century. Instead, they meet and blend both of these portrait traditions at an ideal half-way point that reveal complex human purposes that have much to say about the emerging social dynamics of a changing world. Make no mistake, in this collection of Venetian portraits, we see representations of people who are very much actors in their world of vastly expanded horizons. They gained their identity from their participation in marketplace of social positions rather than from any divine mandate, giving them fascinating backstories that make them rich and vivid in appearance and personality.
 
Giorgione, "Youth with an Arrow", ca. 1508-1510, oil on panel
It is worth noting that this exhibition contains at least four (and possibly five) paintings by the artist known as Giorgione of Castelfranco (as he was proclaimed by Giorgio Vassari) or just Giorgione, that being the first of many Venetian stage names for painters who at that time were as adored as movie stars are in our own day. Given that there was a major exhibition including several works by Giorgione in 2006 at the National Gallery in Washington D.C., I would say that the odds of seeing this many of his works in one room of any museum in North America in the foreseeable future are almost nil, so this fact alone confirms this exhibition as an art historical landmark. 
 
Giorgione is an historical enigma, and as befits such a mystery-shrouded figure, he was and still is well known for painting enigmatic pictures.  There is much speculation about the extent to which he and his master Giovanni Bellini might have been influenced by Leonardo Di Vinci’s use of layered atmospheric colorations, and, given the facts that Leonardo was in Milan from 1482 to 1499, and that Bellini competed with Leonardo for commissions during those years, and finally, that Leonardo had in fact visited Venice in 1500, the case for influence is certainly very plausible. This exhibition contains one painting by Giorgione that seems to confirm that influence: the stunning Portrait of a Youth with an Arrow (1505), a work that seems a very close cousin to the older artist’s works titled Bacchus and St. John the Baptist. But pay heed (!)—both the Leonardo Bacchus and St. John were painted after 1512, well after the completion of the aforementioned Giorgione portrait—suggesting that, in the case of these two artists, the anxiety of influence might have been a two-way street. The fact that Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa and the famous Virgin with St. Anne of Freudian monograph fame after his visit to Venice also prompts one of those moments of head scratching in the face of a thickening art historical plot.

Even more enigmatic is the best work in the entire exhibition. It was painted by Giorgione from 1506 to 1508, just after the completion of his most famous work titled The Tempest. It is titled The Three Philosophers, and it is a treasure trove of painterly subtly and pictorial sophistication. It shows three male figures standing in a landscape next to a dark embankment of earth that might be taken as a shallow cave. The youngest of the trio sits closest to the cave and stares upward with a fool’s amazement, while the oldest stands furthest from the cave, clutching a parchment that seems to be covered with astrological inscriptions. Between the two of them is a man of middle age clothed in red and blue, wearing a turban. He seems to be reaching behind the older figure, but look closely, and you can see that he is also taking a step in the opposite direction, toward the cave. Behind them is a twilit landscape that surrounds a small monastery comfortably nestled in a distant valley.
 
Giorgione, "The Three Philosophers", ca. 1508-1509, oil on canvas
 
The scholarly debate about this painting is almost as fascinating as that pertaining to The Tempest, and is equally inconclusive. At one point, it was believed to be a portrayal of the Holy Magi on their way to Bethlehem, a rather silly interpretation that read way too much into the fact that the central figure is capped by a turban, a common non-denominational headgear at the turn of the 16th century. If this was true, why is there no baby Jesus in the cave? What theological misadventure could possibly account for this pointed absence?
 
The more recent view of the painting seems much more plausible, but is still problematic. It assumes that the three figures are representations of three pre-Socratic philosophers, the seated figure being Pythagoras (he clings to a small framing square as if it were a magical talisman), the central figure being Pherecydes of Syros and the older figure, cloaked in what might seem to be a Franciscan frock covered by a shimmering yellow blanket, being a representation of Thales. Together, they are said to be the founding fathers of ancient philosophy, a pictorial theme that would have appealed to the widespread thirst for Classical knowledge that was felt throughout Italy during those years leading up to the tumultuous schism between protestant reformers and the mother church. The only problem with this theory is that Giorgione would never have been so obviously literal, especially when deeper and more subtle purposes could be achieved.
 
Veronese, "Lucretia"., ca. 1580-1583, oil on canvas
 A better way to approach the painting is to view the trio of figures not as a representation of actual philosophers, but rather, as allegorical representations of the three foundational questions of philosophy: 1) What is the world made of? (i.e. natural science, represented by the seated figure); 2) What is the nature of consciousness of the world? (psychology, represented by the wise old man standing at the right side of the composition); and 3) What should be done with the knowledge gained from the pursuit of the first two questions? (ethics, represented by the central figure).  The puzzle grows more complex when we read the monastery and the shallow cave as philosophical figures that complete the story of the painting. For complex reasons, the figures have departed from the comfortable monastery (representing the medieval order) and have come to face the cave of ultimate unknowability.  Its depth is uncertain, but it serves as an ominous specter of womb and tomb, looking much like the traditional Renaissance representation of the site of Christ’s entombment and subsequent resurrection. The framing square held by the seated figure is clearly a feeble and paltry instrument for gaining the knowledge required by the painting (geometry being a cowardly alternative to geomancy), and the figure holding the parchment seems obviously fearful of what lurks within, as no amount of self-knowledge can overcome the terror of the void. Only the man of ethical action seems up to the challenge of confronting the dark space of non-differentiation, and even he proceeds with judicious care, reaching back to the older figure for the self-knowledge necessary for courageous forward motion.
 
But, to paraphrase Freud, sometimes a cave is just a cave (or not even a cave) and Giorgione brilliantly plays that angle as well, by portraying it as a shallow embankment that for a brief moment might have looked like a cave. But before we start laughing too hard at the subtle philosophical trick that Giorgione has played on his trio of wise men, I would direct your attention to a small pile of rocks situated at the lower left corner of the composition. Do they not look just a little bit like a formidable hump-backed serpent? It may not be a dragon worthy of Saint George, but is a clever reminder of the specter of peril that lurks in the shadows of the philosophical enterprise, especially when that enterprise contemplates a void that is not really a void. As to the perils of the artistic enterprise, Giorgione gives us a very different answer: radiance and range of color, rich variation of soft and crisp edge and an intoxicating dose of dreamy atmospherics, all stirred with a stunning masterly touch.
–MARK VAN PROYEN
#  #  #
 
"Masters of Venice: Renaissance Paintings of Passion and Power " @ the de Young Museum through February. 12, 2012.
 
About the Author:
Mark Van Proyen is Chair of the Painting Department of the San Francisco Art Institute. He is a corresponding editor for Art in America, and his critical writings have appeared in many publications, including Art Criticism, Artweek and Art Issues. He is currently working on a novel titled Theda’s Island, the story of which is set in the art world.

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