Cy Twombly: Natural History, Part I, Mushrooms

No. I 1974
Lithograph and mixed media on paper
support: 758 x 558 mm, on paper, unique

No. II 1974
Lithograph and mixed media on paper
support: 758 x 558 mm, on paper, unique

No. III 1974
Lithograph and mixed media on paper
support: 758 x 558 mm, on paper, unique

No. IV 1974
Lithograph and mixed media on paper
support: 758 x 558 mm, on paper, unique

No. V 1974
Lithograph and mixed media on paper
support: 758 x 558 mm, on paper, unique

No. VI 1974
Lithograph and mixed media on paper
support: 758 x 558 mm, on paper, unique

No. VII 1974
Lithograph and mixed media on paper
support: 758 x 558 mm, on paper, unique

No. VIII 1974
Lithograph and mixed media on paper
support: 758 x 558 mm, on paper, unique

No. IX 1974
Lithograph and mixed media on paper
support: 758 x 558 mm, on paper, unique

No. X 1974
Lithograph and mixed media on paper
support: 758 x 558 mm, on paper, unique

This is one of two portfolios made in the mid 1970s, the other being ‘Natural History Part II (Some Trees of Italy)’ 1976. Twombly uses a quasi-scientific presentation with his characteristic expressive, gestural graphic language; the prints contain a variety of different lithographic printings with collaged sheets of paper and photographs.

American painter, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor. He studied from 1948 to 1951. In 1951–2 he spent a semester at Black Mountain College, an important period for his involvement with Abstract Expressionism. Action painting in particular, became his point of departure for the development of a highly personal ‘handwriting' that served as a vehicle for literary content.

In Untitled (1952; Basle, Kstmus.) Twombly used long brushstrokes in contrasting tones against a dark background, only to paint partly over them again. This alternation between the visible and the hidden has been interpreted as a struggle between memory and oblivion.

In the mid 1950s Twombly began working also in chalk and pencil and his paintings assumed a more graphic character. The stylistic changes in his paintings were subsequently registered more or less simultaneously in his prolific production of drawings and prints. The potential of gestural brushwork as a form of handwriting was not exploited by Twombly until he settled in Rome and found inspiration in classical landscapes and literature.

In the 1960s Twombly made particular use of subjective, erotic signs in his paintings, and he began to use more intense and denser colours.

From 1976 Twombly again produced sculptures, lightly painted in white, suggestive of Classical forms. In the mid 1970s Twombly began to evoke landscape through colour (favouring brown, green and light blue), written inscriptions and collage elements, often distributing these features across the surface by means of right angles that emphasize the legibility of the image and its narrative character.

Miroslaw Balka: Oasis (C.D.F.) 1989

Oasis (C.D.F.) 1989
Mixed media, displayed: 3730 x 3763 x 4510 mm, sculpture

This multi-part installation is composed of fourteen wooden parts, one of which is attached to the end of a rain pipe and supports a small metal tray which contains an electric water pump that has milk running from it. A free standing bed unit is partially filled with pine needles and a doorsill sits on the floor in the foreground. Some of the parts are mounted on a wall while others sit directly on the floor in positions determined by the artist.

In response to a questionnaire sent in November 1999, the artist revealed that he used old, weathered wood from his house in Otwolk. The pieces of wood are rough and textured with cement residues, plaster and other filling materials. There is also some paint in localised areas. As the artist explained in January 2000, he applied black paint on the top of the coffin and painted the black leaves himself. The bottom left vertical plank of the house frame is decorated with a fixed metal flower ornament whereas the equivalent right-hand plank is decorated with a pencil drawing of another flower. The coffin piece comes from another sculpture, River, which the artist modified by cutting and assembling it. The sculpture has been assembled mostly using nails. The tin-plate metal tray has welded joints and is meant to slide in and out of the drain pipe section that supports it. Screws are used to fix the parts that are mounted on the wall.

There are hand-written inscriptions on the back of most of the wooden pieces and on the cardboard pieces under the plywood in the bed, mainly giving the artist’s name, work’s title and instructions for installation. Most of the planks have been given a letter and indications as to where to position them.

When the work arrived, the metal tray was quite rusted. The existing water pump (not original to the work) and wiring were considered dangerous. There was a small broken and detached piece at one extremity of the drain pipe and some of the wooden pieces had noticeable splits. There was flaking of filling and paint materials, and some pine needles were falling through the gaps along the interior sides of the bed. However, the artist wants to maintain the weathered aspect of the work. The metal tray was cleaned and the holes in the tin plate repaired by soldering. The surface was then coated for protection. The water pump and wiring were replaced and the broken piece was repositioned and fixed. Brown tape was installed along the interior edges of the bed in order to prevent the pine needles from falling through the gaps in the plywood board.

Gabriel Orozco at MOMA

"I don't like a big enterprise of people working for me," he said. "I don't want to be a master. I want to be a kid. To keep making art, you have to put yourself in the position of a beginner. You have to be excited by a stone on the sidewalk or, like a child, the flight of a bird."

In 1993, the year that he created "La DS," Mr. Orozco's career took off with multiple exhibitions. Among them was one that Marian Goodman arranged at the Venice Biennale, where he showed "Empty Shoebox," an open cardboard box left on the floor to be kicked about. "It shocked everybody," Ms. Goodman said. "He has a lot of courage in what he does and can be quite radical."

"La DS," a well-polished silver Citroën sliced lengthwise and reassembled without the middle third, is Mr. Orozco's signature work, a totemic French car remade in a Peugeot garage on the outskirts of Paris in 1993.

Villa Julia designed by Mariscal 2009

A small cardboard house designed for Magis by Javier Mariscal.

Kehinde Wiley: Black Light at Deitch, 76 Grand Street, New York

Kehinde Wiley

Enokura, Nomura, Takamatsu: Photographs 1968 - 1979 at McCaffrey Fine Art, New York

Detail of The Earth Rotation, Nov 19. 1979 14:16 - 14:46, 90x90cm. Hitoshi Nomura

Koji Enokura (1942-1995), Hitoshi Nomura (b. 1945), and Jiro Takamatsu (1936-1998) were and are non-traditional practitioners of photography working in genres including performance, sculpture, painting, music, and video. They are part of a generation of artists that emerged during the later 1960s who used the precision of photography’s registration of time, motion, and space to reveal physical truths and structures of meaning that are otherwise unapparent.

Nomura began his career by using photography to examine chance composition and transformation in his sculptural works such as Tardiology, 1968-69. In 1972 he embarked upon a ten year long project documenting his day-to-day existence using a film camera set to slow shutter speed called Ten Year Photobook or The Brownian Motion of Eyesight. Later a deepening engagement with science is reflected in The Earth Rotation series of 1979, where Nomura's long exposures of blurred seascapes and landscapes against a motionless sky contradict our Ptolemaic perception of the world.
To make Photograph of Photograph, Takamatsu commissioned a professional photographer to re-photograph a series of prints from his family album in compositions that he had arranged. Each photograph was taken from an acute angle to articulate deep shadows and bleached-out highlights, making plain the abraded dog-eared corners and dents in the photographic emulsion. Takamatsu's Photograph of Photograph examines our ritualistic reenactment of memories and our struggle against their loss through photographs. It further reveals how vintage prints acquire their own unique history and narrative that is separate from their mimetic function.
Enokura's photographs from 1972-74 are designated as performances and sculptures called Symptoms and more interrogatory photoworks identified by the subtitle P.W. The Symptoms series explore physical and existential concerns as Enokura traces the point of contact between man and matter, and the permeability of these borders in works such as Symptom - Sea, Body, 1972. In the P.W. series humble objects are photographed in the absence of an explicit narrative, conveying a pervasive sense of quietude and emptiness where differentiation and naming cease and a simple formal beauty resonates.
Hitoshi Nomura's work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions and publications. Major retrospective exhibitions have taken place at the National Museum of Modern Art, Osaka (1987); Art Tower Mito, Ibaraki Prefecture (2000); The Toyota Municipal Museum of Art (2001); and most recently at The National Arts Center, Tokyo (2009). Jiro Takamatsu was a co-founder of the art collective Hi Red Center and later was a member of the Mono-Ha movement. He has had one man exhibitions at the Niigata City Art Museum (1996); the National Museum of Art, Osaka (1999); and Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art (2004). Koji Enokura (like Nomura) first received international recognition in the 1971 Paris Biennial and subsequently exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1978 and 1980. Most recently his work was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2005).
Enokura, Nomura, Takamatsu: Photographs 1968 - 1979 an exhibition at McCaffrey Fine Art of ground-breaking conceptual photoworks, on view from August 11th - September 26th 2009

Winter Works on Paper

John Lennon & Paul McCartney Anonymous, c. 1964

Simon Faithfull Gravity Sucks at the BFI

Double Object at Thomas Dane

Double Object was first conceived and staged on 14 June, 2008 at Occasionals, an artist run project space organised by Philomene Pirecki in her studio (www.occasionals.co.uk). Leigh Robb invited six London-based artists to respond to the idea of the double object: Bradford Bailey, Vanessa Billy, Jason Dungan, Elizabeth McAlpine, Sam Porritt and Maria Zahle. Also included were works from the 70s by Dieter Roth and Barry Flanagan, as well as more recent pieces by Glenn Ligon and Michel François.

For the Thomas Dane show, the Occasionals exhibition will be re-staged in one of the gallery spaces. Becoming a double object itself, the show will include new works by the original group of artists. It will also be expanded to include work by Philomene Pirecki and historic pieces by other artists whose use of doubling or pairing is integral to their practice, such as Roni Horn, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Bob Law and Dieter Roth/Richard Hamilton.

This exhibition becomes an expanded site of research. Many of the artists are presenting new works which further investigate the potential of the double, and how such a simple construct can open up a more complex field of possibility both formally and conceptually. From a pair, copy or diptych to studies in repetition, synchronicity and comparison, the double is a structure that forces questions of singularity and difference. This exhibition is an opportunity to think about why it recurs as a pivotal strategy both historically and for artists working today.

Anni Leppälä | Helsinki School

From the series Possibility of Constancy (Still Life), 2007

William Christenberry

Red Building in Forest, Hale County, Alabama 1983. Chromogenic color print, 17 5/16 x 22" (44 x 56 cm).
© 2009 William Christenberry

American, Hale County, Alabama 1984 - 1985
Balsa and basswood, plywood, tempera, paper, and red soil
12 3/4 x 23 x 21 in.

With the encouragement of Walker Evans, William Christenberry began to pursue photography seriously and focus on the landscape of Hale County, Alabama, which he has photographed for more than twenty-five years. Christenberry is devoted to the heritage of the South and, using his training as a sculptor and painter, interprets it in a range of media.

William Christenberry

Andy Kessler | The End of Falling | Soul Artist of Zoo York

Andy Kessler, West 30th Street, Manhattan, 2005.


Deathbowl to Downtown

The Pictures Generation at the MET

Untitled (President: 4), 1979, Sherrie Levine (American, born 1947), Collage on paper
24 x 18 in. (60.9 x 45.7 cm), Mary Martin Fund, 1990 (1990.1057), © Sherrie Levine

This work belongs to Levine's Presidents series—silhouettes of Washington, Lincoln, and Kennedy cut from magazine pages showing mothers with children, fashion models, and other stock images of women. The specter of commodification and exchange value, signified in the penny profile of Lincoln, lurks around the edges of the model's image, revealing the mechanisms of seduction and desire hidden beneath the advertisement's effects. Her treatment allows the advertisement to incriminate itself, a cool subversion of media imagery that characterizes much artistic production in the 1980s.

Young artists who came of age in the early 1970s were greeted by an America suffused with disillusionment from dashed hopes for political and social transformation to the continuation of the Vietnam War and the looming Watergate crisis. The utopian promise of the counterculture had devolved into a commercialized pastiche of rebellious stances prepackaged for consumption, and the national mood was one of catatonic shell-shock in response to wildly accelerated historical change, from the sexual revolution to race riots and assassinations. Similarly, the elder generation of artists seemed to have both dramatically expanded the field of what was possible in the field of art while staking out its every last claim, either by dematerializing the aesthetic object entirely into the realm of pure idea or linguistic proposition as in Conceptualism, or by rivaling the cataclysmic processes and sublime vistas of the natural world itself as did the so-called earthworks artists such as Robert Smithson, who died in 1973.
What these fledgling artists did have fully to themselves was the sea of images into which they were born—the media culture of movies and television, popular music, and magazines that to them constituted a sort of fifth element or a prevailing kind of weather. Their relationship to such material was productively schizophrenic: while they were first and foremost consumers, they also learned to adopt a cool, critical attitude toward the very same mechanisms of seduction and desire that played upon them from the highly influential writings of French philosophers and cultural critics such as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Julia Kristeva that were just beginning to be made available in translation. Among these thinkers' central ideas was that identity was not organic and innate, but manufactured and learned through highly refined social constructions of gender, race, sexuality, and citizenship. These constructions were embedded within society's institutions and achieved their effects through the myriad expressions of the mass media. Barthes infamously extended this concept to question the very possibility of originality and authenticity in his 1967 manifesto "The Death of the Author," in which he stated that any text (or image), rather than emitting a fixed meaning from a singular voice, was but a tissue of quotations that were themselves references to yet other texts, and so on.

Ute Klein

from the series Resonanzgeflechte – Leibhafter Raum

The Wassaic Project, New York

Bob: Irresistible Possibilities

Rebus, 1955 Robert Rauschenberg

"I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop. At the time that I am bored or understand — I use those words interchangeably — another appetite has formed. A lot of people try to think up ideas. I’m not one. I’d rather accept the irresistible possibilities of what I can’t ignore. Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody else’s aesthetics. I think you’re born an artist or not. I couldn’t have learned it, and I hope I never do because knowing more only encourages your limitations.”

Robert Rauschenberg interviewed on Captiva in 2000.

Petros Christostomou

Skatospore (II)

Pulse (48 Hanway Street)

Hero (18 Fortis Green)

Petros Christostomou’s work is concerned with the relationship between objects and their contexts. He builds models of rooms and then places unexpected objects within them. Through unsettling combinations of scale and content, Christostomou challenges our perceptions. Interested in simulacra (ideas of likeness or similarity), he aims to question the role of the photograph in our post modern era by challenging our visual perceptions.

Petros Christostomou

Stutter: Michael Ridel's Filmed Film Trailer (2008) at Tate Modern

Michael Riedel, Filmed Film Trailer 2008
Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, New York

Stutter

The onomatopoeic word 'Stutter' refers to an act of speech interrupted by agitated, spasmodic, or involuntary repetitions. As the title for this exhibition, it suggests a metaphor for questions of disruption and discontinuity in processes of thought, systems of communications or conceptions of knowledge. The exhibition encompasses a wide range of artistic practices that incorporate repetition and interruption in order to convey meaning, whether through language, gesture, sound or images. In their highly methodical processes of work, Sven Augustijnen, Anna Barham, Dominique Petitgand, Michael Riedel and Will Stuart create a space for error, irrationality and transformation. Combining actions and strategies such as editing, quoting, translating, conversing, duplicating or indexing, these artists reveal a multiplicity of perspectives, directions and potentialities.
Michael Riedel (b1972, Germany)
Michael Riedel’s Filmed Film Trailer (2008) derives from a 16-hour edit of footage from screenings of experimental films. From 1999 to 2002 over 40 hours of video recordings were made and the results were shown as Filmed Film events at Oskar-von-Miller Strasse 16 in Frankfurt/Main. The auto focus mechanism of the camera often wasn’t able to focus on the film and some of the shots are blurred and appear to be vibrating. Badly filmed, the image moves within the image or the film within the film disappears. Seldom are the original film and the filmed version identical in length, the life of the camera’s battery often determined the duration of the film. Using the programme Final Cut, Riedel distilled the assembly into a frenetic ‘trailer’ for Filmed Film lasting 7 minutes. In the process, an overload of information produces an array of gaps, elisions and errors that create an entirely new work.
Four proposals for the change of modern (2009) belongs to a series of works that Riedel began in 2008 for a group show at The Modern Institute in Glasgow. Cutting the word ‘modern’ from the gallery’s logo out of a piece of black fabric and turning the resulting banner on each of its sides, four new shapes were created by chance. Four proposals for the change of modern foregrounds process by drawing distinctions and opening up an infinite number of abstract forms, which allows the word ‘modern’ to be read as an ever changing moment. Through these methods, Riedel effects a gradual degradation of form and disintegration of language.

Marisa Merz

Marisa Merz (b. 1925, Turin)
The works of Marisa Merz display many of the fundamental themes and preoccupations associated with Arte Povera. These include an interest in flowing, organic forms, a concentration on subjectivity and the visionary, the embracing of 'low' types of art such as craft, and the relationship between art and life. 'There has never been any division between my life and my work', she has said. She often adapts traditional practices associated with female domesticity, such as knitting, and the idea of home as a private, intimate and feminine realm is central to her work. In 1966, for example, she created the spectacular work Untitled (Living Sculpture), both for her own house and as a gallery installation. It was made from thin strips of shiny aluminium, clipped together and suspended from the ceiling to form great coiled and spiralling forms, creating a magical environment.

In 1968, she began knitting nylon or copper threads into simple geometric shapes to fit her body. Little Shoes, 1970, for instance, is a nylon-thread sculpture made for her feet. Bea, 1968, is another knitted work, spelling out her daughter's name. These delicate, web-like works have been installed both along gallery walls and in external locations such as beaches. Outdoors, they appear to grow like plants or grip on like living creatures. This inter-weaving of threads into a complicated network implies both an obsessive energy and ideas of communication and interconnection. Merz herself has spoken of an intense excitement running through these threads.

Mr.Shulman's Case Study Houses

Pierre Koenig's Case Study House No. 22. 1960

Chemosphere. Octagonal home built by John Lautner. 1960

Working mostly in California, Julius Shulman staged his photographs as tableaus to promote the idea of casual living in a Modernist context. Carefully composed and artfully lighted, his images promoted not only new approaches to home design but also the ideal of idyllic California living — a sunny, suburban lifestyle played out in sleek, spacious, low-slung homes featuring ample glass, pools and patios, photographing buildings by some of the era’s best-known architects, including Richard Neutra, Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles and Ray Eames, Mies van der Rohe and Oscar Niemeyer.

Dan Graham: Somewhere between architecture and television

Rooftop Urban Park Project 1981-1991, at the Dia Center for the Arts

Public Space/Two Audiences 1976, at the Herbert Collection in Ghent, Belgium

Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and artist Dan Graham in conversation
Time Out New York, May 7, 2009

WHAT: Graham’s retrospective
WHEN: June 25–October 11
WHERE: Whitney Museum, 945 Madison Ave at 75th St (212-570-3600, whitney.org)

WHAT: Sonic Youth’s new album, The Eternal, and an NYC performance
WHEN: June 9 (album); July 3 (concert)
WHERE: United Palace, 4140 Broadway at 175th St (212-685-1414)

Dan Graham: Congratulations on the BAM concert.

Thurston Moore: Oh, thank you so much. Congratulations to you too on your retrospective.

Graham: You saw my show when it was at MoCA in L.A., right? With your daughter? I hope she liked one of my favorite pieces, Girl’s Makeup Room.

Moore: She loved that piece! That was a great way to experience it, too, by going there with her. I told her, “This is the artist I met when I moved to New York.” I lived in the same building as you on 84 Eldridge Street. Those years were a crash course in discovering the New York art world, which I had sort of had some handle on when I was playing with people from the Rhode Island School of Design. Our shows were always at Jenny Holzer’s loft. That age group—artists like Robert Longo and Holzer and other ’70s art graduates— they were always talking about you and Vito Acconci. I first met Kim [Gordon] when I was playing in a band that [later] became Sonic Youth, but it didn’t have a name yet. I remember I was rehearsing at Acconci’s studio in Brooklyn and the first time I met you was when you were there one afternoon, sitting at the table with Vito, and you were both discussing punk rock and No Wave records. I was kind of fascinated that these two artists were having a really heavy discussion on Gang of Four. [Laughs]

Graham: Well, as a would-be rock writer, I was always fascinated by music. My closest friend for a long time was Steve Reich. I presented his work, actually, in the Paula Cooper Gallery. That’s why I moved to New York, not to be an artist, but to be a writer. I was a slacker, I didn’t know what to do with my life. I knew a little bit about art through reading Esquire magazine, which published a lot of writing about art. But at the time, everyone had this idea of being the artist-writer: Robert Smithson wanted to be like Borges. Dan Flavin wanted to be like James Joyce.

Radical Nature at the Barbican

Social Mirror, 1983. A mirror-covered sanitation truck by US artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Photograph: Mierle Laderman Ukeles/Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York

Agnes Deans: Wheatfield – A Confrontation, 1982. She planted and harvested two acres of wheat in Battery Park landfill, Manhattan. Photograph: Agnes Denes/Public Art Fund, New York

Island for Weeds, 2003, by British conceptual artist Simon Starling
Photograph: Jeremy Hardman Jones/Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow

Land artist Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, 1970 (in the Great Salt Lake, Utah)
Photograph: Gianfranco Gorgoni/James Cohan Gallery, New York

Radical Nature is the first exhibition to bring together key figures across different generations who have created utopian works and inspiring solutions for our ever-changing planet. Radical Nature draws on ideas that have emerged out of Land Art, environmental activism, experimental architecture and utopianism. The exhibition is designed as one fantastical landscape, with each piece introducing into the gallery space a dramatic portion of nature. Work by pioneering figures such as the architectural collective Ant Farm and visionary architect Richard Buckminster Fuller, artists Joseph Beuys, Agnes Denes, Hans Haacke and Robert Smithson are shown alongside pieces by a younger generation of practitioners including Heather and Ivan Morison, R&Sie(n), Philippe Rahm architects and Simon Starling.

Clemens von Wedemeyer at the Curve Gallery

Von Wedemeyer’s work is entitled The Fourth Wall, after the ‘imaginary screen’ conceived by actors as a means to imagine themselves alone and which, at the same time, enables the audience to believe the drama on stage is real.

United Visual Artists: Deus at the Smithfield Gallery

UVA’s first photographic show explores the potential of light to redefine an environment, both physically and emotionally. The exhibition aims to distill the experience of UVA’s installation work into a series of striking, large-scale images. These photographs document a number of experimental light installations in secluded areas of Britain - huge artificial lights which are in sharp contrast to the natural landscape around them, creating an ephemeral new space.

UVA | United Visual Artists

Michel Auder

Full Metal Jacket. Series of 2 Digital C-Print, 20 x 24. 1971.

In French-American film-maker Michel Auder's work, the camera both witnesses and directs social exchange. It describes a highly subjective position, moving about his environment, recording its soundtrack, admitting incidental drama, autobiographical detail and the real-time incursions of broadcast media. In the early 1970’s Michel Auder adopted a continuous approach to film-making, recording the people and scenarios he encountered and amassing an extensive archive of video footage. His films collide with narratives in art history and popular memory, involving artists, writers, and musicians that he has come to know. Michel Auder's films have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and Centre Pompidou in Paris. He lives and works in New York. 

Embassy Art

Sol Lewitt's Wall Drawing #1256: Five Pointed Stars was installed in Berlin in 2008

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