Romanov Grave » Curating Ideas

The Apex Is Nothing

Romanov Grave — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 23:33:31 +0000

Alfred Jensen created works of art whose conception was subject to extra-aesthetic imperatives, even to the point of forcing “un-aesthetic” decisions. This show exhibits essentially abstract works by a range of artists whose visual power is likewise catalyzed by the incursion or absorption of factors beyond the picture plane.

The center of energy in Jensen’s paintings and drawings sits on a boundary between abstract form and an array of idea structures. His intensely visual production isn’t representational in any conventional way, yet seems forcefully shaped by realities outside the strict visual concerns of painting or drawing (concerns like philosophy, numbering systems, mathematical and scientific ideas).

For other artists in this show such areas include statistical data, language and text, mapped social or political matrices, or a pointedly tactile reality that contests composed visual relations. This artwork can embody an abstraction that seems formed, or even excitingly deformed and pushed into unexpected shapes, by collision with the “extra-aesthetic”. In viewing such work, we feel the tension of our desire to pull what we see into an aesthetic framework, to recuperate what might seem like surprising choices and unusual structures back into a pictorial focus, to reconcile their obvious (if inscrutable) logic with the more familiar logic we expect to order the parts of a picture.

Ideas invested in art in this strange way can seem to present an invitation to solve a puzzle, to grasp superimposed patterns, or to finally resolve odd symmetries. Yet, this process of thoughtful looking more likely leads not to an answer, but to a space. Not to a something, but rather to a more valuable nothing.

Artists in the Exhibition:
Melissa Brown
Ingrid Calame
Linda Francis
Xylor Jane
Alfred Jensen
Paul Laffoley
Mark Lombardi
Dan Miller
John O’Connor
Roman Opalka
George Ortman
Bruce Pearson
Tim Smith
Jorinde Voigt
Ken Weathersby
George Widener

VIDEO>SCULPTURE

Romanov Grave — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 00:11:29 +0000

Video has had a long relationship with sculpture, from the stacked televison “gardens” of Nam June Paik and the closed-circuit corridors of Bruce Nauman to the more recent projections onto and into objects and architecture by the likes of Pipilloti Rist and Mona Hatoum. With the now established practice of projecting hugely onto several walls at once, the white cube itself is made into a sculpture, subject to spatial manipulations.

This exhibition proposes to examine a different nexus of video and sculpture, one in which the making and/or history of the object is intimately connected to the video, as documentary or commentary. Although the videos in “Video>Sculpture” are formally and conceptually engaged with the precedents and issues of video, and the sculptures are immersed in the phenomenal world, emphatically objects down to their metaphorical fingertips, in all these pairings there is a strong suggestion of cause and effect. Yet, ultimately, that effect goes just off register, slightly askew. Perhaps a documentary intention is derailed into the uncanny, or ironic reversals are instigated to create some kind of displacement, or cause and effect draw so close together, have so little breathing space between them, that tautology emerges. Whatever the procedure, in these video/sculpture couplings the if-then proposition is unseated, or at least made to wobble.

Jolly Matters

Romanov Grave — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:00:28 +0000

The material world is teased in Jolly Matters. It is an exhibition composed of plastic, paint, wood, and paper. Then there are the intense and extreme colors of the objects which, like a pink bubble-gum painted room, make for good ambiance and a most agreeable mood. The lively and vibrant hued things chosen for Jolly Matters are objects that ostensibly produce sensations of cheerfulness and glee; perhaps together they might even raise our serotonin levels after a long dark winter. These objects by the four artists are in fact only superficial introductions to more incisive implications and intentions. They are not just quirky fanciful things with strikingly crafted allusions to happy psyches and elevated states of mind but also objects that present some complex and complicated associations.

Marilyn Lerner

As in the paintings by Marilyn Lerner, there is more to her meticulously painted structures than the manipulation of color and motif. Her exacting and almost mathematical organization of color relationships are collected from her interest in the geometric patterns of Indian and Jain painting. She manages to float pigments on slick, hard surfaces, creating a kind of transcendent geometry that seems to illustrate other worldly puzzles. Her paintings aspire to the transcendent with the intent to elevate the viewer’s predilections and aspirations for a pleasurable state of mind although she offers no code to her personal symbols; only a small window into an east/west dream…the viewer is an Alice in Wonderland down a very problematic rabbit hole.

John Monti

John Monti’s work is altogether another matter, however seemingly jolly. In his material world, the plastic substances he chooses for his objects reference a darker side to his comic imagery. His works communicate an ironic confidence in an un-changing synthetic utopian world where brightly colored things, of which there is no short supply, will be sustainable and where a “happy” future is facilitated by seductive illusions to prosperity. The longevity of his plastic objects is, by the very nature of the material, resistant to change. The metaphor is: Society’s desires equal its possible demise.

Barbara Schwartz

Barbara Schwartz was one of several artists who sought to vitalize abstract painting by making it more dimensional and like Marilyn Lerner, tried to link it to non-Western traditions. Her constructions from handmade paper with areas of brightly colored dabbles build a complicated visual uncertainly about the object’s shape and structure even though they are balanced organic and geometric forms.

Schwartz’s objects encourage physical movement as the viewer’s vision moves across the object’s frontal planes to the sides with other flat surfaces. Schwartz was inspired by the gestures and costumes of Thai dancing that she has rendered in her objects with a sense of elegance and gracefulness. However, there is oddness about these objects. The expressionistic quality of the roughly textured surfaces is oddly cartoonish. They appear as caricatures of something unrecognizable.

Daniel Wiener

Engaging with Daniel Wiener’s work is like daydreaming or partaking in the spirit of a child’s fairy tale -things coming out of nowhere and then taking an imaginative leap. His objects hang from the ceiling from filament, conveying the feeling that they are floating, like islands hovering in the air. But the daydream also has a dark side as there is always something unsatisfying and disappointing about a daydream. It consistently contains an unfulfilled wish, something ultimately vacant for the dreamer. Wiener says he is interested in this absence, or sense of loss, that for him is at the heart of daydreaming. Wiener is looking for truth or answers through in his work but he also seems to be looking for an exit. His objects are, to some degree, that escape hatch. But escape from what? Guilt, worry, anxiety, shame, self-hatred, an inability to communicate, boredom, fear? These are the emotions hidden beneath the “whimsical” exterior in his work.

In Jolly Matters there is no manic state of mind expressed, only a more complex reading of visual objects that beguile us with eye candy that happens to have a chewy center.

Curated by Romanov Grave

Modern Mistresses

Romanov Grave — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 20:50:20 +0000

Recently, re-evaluations of the feminist contribution to post-modernist art have begun to emerge. One particular feminist strategy, frequently employed in the 80’s and 90’s, seems ripe for revisiting. During that period many women artists were driven to appropriate specific artworks by so-called “modern masters.” Usually these male artists were at least a generation older than the appropriators: Rachel Lachowitz and Carl Andre, Deborah Kass and Andy Warhol, Bonnie Rychlak and Donald Judd, Sue Williams and Richard Prince. Occasionally the gap was wider: Sherrie Levine and Marcel Duchamp, Kathy Grove and Andre Kertez, Janine Antoni and Jospeph Bueys. In all cases, however, some mixture of impudence, affection and/or desperate anger fueled these sometimes daring, sometimes sly “thefts.” Now that much has changed for women artists, it is perhaps important to review a moment when women felt the need to confront particularly iconic male artists—“feminina a mano,”that is to say, combat with a woman’s touch.

Some of these projects may have expressed a desire to “correct” an overtly or subtly sexist image. Richard Prince’s “dirty jokes,” themselves appropriated, played deliberately around the edges of offense; Sue Williams’caricatures rudely refused the ambiguity, making the victimization both clear and burlesqued. In a similar move towards exaggeration , Deborah Kass took the hints of misogyny and anti-semitism in Warhol’s before and after rhinoplasty to the extreme rebuttal: Barbara Streisand’s triumphant refusal to alter her most tellingly “jewish” feature.

Often, faced with an unrelentingly macho strain in miminalist sculpture, the urge to “feminize” choice examples of the same was overwhelming. Thus Bonnie Rychlak’s decision to perpetrate the unspeakable on Donald Judd’s withholding boxes. Buttons, bows, and cushions desecrate the minimalist cube, rendered additionally “soft” by Rychlak’s wax facture. Rachel Lachowitz’s lipstick replacement of Andre’s heavy metal squares functioned similarly.

Claims to transcendental powers were equally challenged. By associating Bueys’ mythically restorative fat with ritualistc eating and regurgitating of her materials—fat, chocolate, soap—Janine Antoni inflects her tub of lard with issues of anorexia and bulimia.

For Sherrie Levine and Kathy Grove appropriation was not simply a tactic but the informing principle of all their work. In removing the female figure from countless “masterpieces” of western art, Grove effectively demonstrated its lynchpin role—the voyeuristic impulse at the heart of an entire visual tradition. Her Kertez extraction is no exception but the everyday familiarity of its black and white modernity heightens the eeriness of this particularly seamless removal. And when Levine recasts a Duchamp mallic mold in frosted glass and sets it inside a pristine vitrine the reversals are evident: prurience turns frigid and the implied violence of Duchamp’s cracked class is disarmed, the work’s much-revered iconclasm made into a bijou.

This exhibition will explore the differing relationships between appropriator and appropriated. Pickpocket or flatterer? Sneak or rebel? Admiring alcolyte or pissed-off competitor? Like a mime who shadows us on a public street, these “copies” invoke the same uneasy mixture of amusement, anger, flattery, embarrassment, and insight.

A few selected images:

[Show as slideshow]

the consulting room

Romanov Grave — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 13:48:20 +0000

Freud’s consulting room.

The notion was a recreation of Freud’s consulting room from Vienna.

This began with my own attempt to resurrect Freud. I never got past making the hat myself, but with others involved: you never know.

There are some obvious objects and images to work with:

The couch
The framed image of Charcot
The man himself
His hat (I already have the that)
The patients
Their symptoms
The Wolfman’s dream and his drawings and paintings of same
The fire in Dora’s dream
Many a hysteric’s lost voice or paralyzed arm

Freud’s collection of antiquities
Freud’s writings
The standard edition
The chows
The maid who showed patients in
Martha who sometimes showed patients in
Anna who he analyzed
Her writings
The poet HD who he analyzed
Her poems
The Wednesday night group where Freud and the boys met (Jung, Ferenczi etc)
Freud’s library
Robert Longo’s drawings of 19 bergasse
Photographs of Freud

Art Through the Ages

Romanov Grave — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:41:16 +0000

In response to Younger than Jesus how about a show with one artist each from five year age groups starting at 15 and going as old as possible? There would be one artist between 15 and 20, one between 20 and 25, etc. up to one artist between 85 and 90, one artist between 90 and 95. I’d be curious to see the connections between different age groups.

Kluge

Romanov Grave — Thu, 14 May 2009 12:36:22 +0000

Used as slang among software developers a “kluge” is an inelegant solution to a momentarily insoluble problem. You need to get the project done and you don’t have time to figure out the correct way to do it so you create a work-around that gets the job done temporarily. Most frequently this is hidden from users. The frontend looks good but the backend is held together with bubblegum and rubber bands. In contemporary art there has been an aesthetic of the ad-hoc and the jerry-rigged but many times this kind of work has a casual elegance or ingenious DIY inventiveness (e.g. Tim Hawkinson), so they are not real examples of a kluge. So I want to look for artworks that succeed as a whole because of an inelegant solution or two, works that possibly use kluge-iness as a method. Are there artworks that have the fundamental difference between the frontend and the backend? It could be difficult to find examples.

And. I tend to believe all human products are kluges.