Exhibition Details
Opening reception and book release October 24th from 6-8 pm. Exhibition continues through January 10, 2010.
Sean Landers: Art, Life and God.
Exhibition Info and Images PDF (9 pages, 2.2mb)
Publication Prospectus PDF (4 pages, 700kb)
I am, in a way, still Chris Hamson –Sean Landers
Since the early 90s, Sean Landers has built up a puzzling and elusive body of work, one that is at once visual and writerly, expressive and performative, one which has consistently defied prevailing art world trends and confounded critical exegesis. Art, Life and God, made in 1990, was his first mature body of work and the first to draw serious critical attention—it has set the tone and laid the conceptual framework for much of what has followed. Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is pleased to present the first full exhibition of this body of work since 1991 and to be publishing Art, Life and God, making it available as an artist’s book as Landers originally envisioned it for the first time.
Art, Life and God is a series of text pieces Landers wrote out longhand on sheets of yellow notebook paper. For exhibition they were tacked to the wall unframed and displayed as “paintings.” It was in these works that performance first became a significant element of Lander’s art; it has remained at the core of his artistic practice ever since. Art, Life and God revolves around a character named Chris Hamson (in reference to Knut Hamsun, author of the early 20th century novel Hunger). He is a loser-everyman-artist and a quasi-autobiographical stand-in whose persona Landers would adopt in the studio. He inhabited the character and the work he produced was ostensibly Chris Hamson’s own, though it was, simultaneously, a record of Landers’ performance and his development of the Chris Hamson persona.
By performing as his own doppelganger Landers was riffing on a classic existentialist trope. Though his is an outrageous, parody version of “the double,” the device is the same that many, Dostoyevsky notable among them, have used as a means of delving into the identity of the self. Throughout Art, Life and God, Landers’s double pursues art world success and carnal satisfaction but remains desperate, poor, alienated and alone. Hamson moves from delusions of personal magnificence to bouts of crippling insecurity and the writing shifts abruptly in tone to match—whether awash in sentimentality, inflamed by passion, or gripped by fantasy, it is emotionally fervent, and completely idiotic, throughout. That the soaring grandiloquence of the title, Art, Life and God (!), should be undermined by crudely scrawled, misspelled, and ungrammatical pages is emblematic. The work addresses genuine aesthetic and philosophical issues, but it does so by way of farce and slapstick. Landers, by drawing a line between the self and the creative persona (and then thoroughly blurring this line), effectively made his work into a platform from which to stage an ongoing existential drama (or, better, an existential comedy.)
With Art, Life and God, Landers created a genuinely innovative way of working. It is the founding document of his career, but more than that, it has an undeniable place among the key works of the past few decades. After its first exhibition (at Postmasters, in 1990) Landers was tagged as a neo-Conceptualist, a term that is often applied imprecisely, but Landers was undoubtedly pivotal to the revival of Conceptual experimentation that occurred in the 90s and he was especially crucial in demonstrating how a Conceptual framework might invigorate painting, drawing and other traditional media to which Conceptualism had previously been thought antithetical. Having studied under him at Yale, Landers was especially cognizant of Vito Acconci’s movement from writing into performance and one way to read Art, Life and God is as a performance that extends the legacy of Acconci’s notorious “Seedbed” show by giving voice to the most base part of the self. Landers, like Acconci, has since moved out into other media and forms, but the methodology he developed in these early experiments remains the core of his work.
Sean Landers was born in Palmer, Massachusetts, in 1962. He received a BFA from the Philadelphia College of Art in 1984 and an MFA from Yale in 1986. His work is included in numerous museums and public collections. He is represented by Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York. A retrospective of his work will open at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis in January, 2010. For information about the exhibition or publication, contact Glenn Horowitz Bookseller at info@GHbookseller.com.
Opens October 1 from 6-8 pm.
Glenn Horowitz Bookseller and Dirk Westphal at the NY Art Book Fair
Glenn Horowitz Bookseller will be exhibiting at Printed Matter’s fourth annual NY Art Book Fair, which is being held at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City. Admission to the fair is free throughout, including the opening preview from 6-8pm on Thursday, October 1st. During the evening preview Dirk Westphal will be on hand to sign copies of his new artist’s book Endless Bummer, newly published by Glenn Horowitz Bookseller (find us on the first floor--take a left at the main entrance and another left into Room H.)
The NY Art Book Fair will be open 11am-7pm on October 2nd and 3rd and 11am-5pm October 4th. For more information about the fair, location, or schedule of events, including the benefit party hosted by Deitch Studios in Long Island City directly following the opening preview, go to: NY Art Book Fair
Saturday, September 26th from 6-8pm
SHOOT: Photography of the Moment
On September 26th, from 6-8 pm please join Glynnis McDaris and Glenn Horowitz Bookseller for a reception celebrating the release of Shoot: Photography of the Moment (Rizzoli, 2009, $45). This new book presents the work of twenty-six young photographers who work quickly an intuitively to capture a moment rather than using elaborate lighting setups or controlled, manufactured scenarios. Employing the most basic photographic tools—a single-lens reflex camera and natural light——they rely on their instincts and their ability to interact with a situation to create a dynamic image. This freewheeling approach reflects an era in which we are increasingly bombarded and saturated by images, and the emotional resonance of images has become an important part of our visual vocabulary. Shoot documents the influence of Nan Goldin, Juergen Teller and Wolfgang Tillmans on a younger generation of photographers, including Glynnis McDaris (http://glynnismcdaris.com), Tim Barber (http://tinyvices.com), Paul Schiek (http://tbwbooks.com) and others, to show how this style has gained traction and influence. With a preface by Stephen Shore and introduction by Penny Martin, Shoot is a remarkable survey of the most innovative contemporary photographers working today.
Opens August 8th with a reception from 6-8 pm; exhibition continues through September 20th
Art—Read
Art—Read is an exhibition of artists’ books and related work in other media by ten young artists: Tauba Auerbach, Fiona Banner, Chris Duncan, Roe Ethridge, Terence Koh, Jason Polan, Seth Price, Dean Sameshima, Paul Schiek and Derek Sullivan.
Each of these artists takes a multidisciplinary approach to making work and in every case has made the creation of artists’ books a significant part of their practice. Art—Read is an exhibition designed to demonstrate the importance of the artists’ book medium, both to the ten artists included and to contemporary art more generally. The exhibition upends outmoded hierarchies which would rank the various media on a scale of minor to major and instead presents books alongside paintings, photos, video, et cetera so as to give books a place in the show commensurate with the weight the artists themselves place on their book works.
Art—Read was inspired in part by a 1976 issue of Art-Rite magazine which focused on artists’ books and included statements by Lawrence Weiner, Adrian Piper, John Baldessari, Sol LeWitt and many of the other artists who had done so much over the preceding ten years or so to create the contemporary artists’ book. In his contribution LeWitt noted that, “books are the best medium for many artists working today.” His assertion would be no less true in 2009 than it was then.
A catalog is forthcoming. In both content and design it will reference the original Art-Rite publication which has provided a conceptual framework for Art—Read. The catalog will document the exhibition, provide info on participating artists, and include both images and bibliographic information on their artists’ books. For more information about the exhibition or for inquiries about the catalog, please contact Glenn Horowitz Bookseller via email, info@GHbookseller.com, or phone, 631-324-5511.
June 27th to August 2nd, with an opening reception on Saturday, June 27th from to 6 to 8 pm.
Bill Jacobson: Figure, Water, Land. 1989 – 2009
Bill Jacobson: Figure, Water, Land. 1989 – 2009 opens with a reception for the photographer on Saturday, June 27th from to 6 to 8 pm and runs through August 2nd. This selection of photographs on view date from the end of the 1980s to the present and reflect Jacobson’s enduring attachment to the theme of temporality in human experience. Using a diffusing lens to obscure the specificity of his subjects, he addresses an emotional, even spiritual experience of vision, gracefully disposing of the objective, documentary uses of photography in favor of subjective experience. Jacobson’s soft-focus images present a moment in time but vividly allude to the transitory quality of the moment, invoking an experience that heightens one’s sense of the temporal while embracing the possibility of its transcendence. A sense of stillness and contemplativeness prevails. As subjects ranging from the figure to landscapes, painting to waterscapes melt before his lens, Jacobson presents sensual moments of great delicacy and introspection.
Concurrently, John McWhinnie & Glenn Horowitz Bookseller at 36 Newtown Lane, East Hampton will present Bill Jacobson: Diana Pictures, an exhibition featuring a selection of vintage photos from the mid 70s made with a Diana camera. Jacobson used the popular and inexpensive camera to make moody black-and-white images draped in a rich tonality of shadow.
Born in Norwich, CT, Bill Jacobson earned his BFA at Brown University and his MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute (1981). His work has been widely exhibited throughout the U.S. and internationally. His photos are included in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among other major institutions and have appeared in numerous publications, including the monographs Bill Jacobson, 1989 – 1997 (Twin Palms, 1997) and Bill Jacobson: Photographs (Hatje Cantz, 2006). He lives and works in New York City.
May 23 to June 23, reception for the artist 6-8 pm, May 23rd
Bill Burke: Destrukto
This exhibition is the first devoted to Bill Burke’s Destrukto series. Also on view will be a collection of one-of-a kind maquettes and notebooks that Burke created over several decades making artist’s books. Burke’s work is visceral and immediate, but behind the action and explosions, the exotic locales, gruesome scenes, and outré material there is a rigorous examination of photographic conventions. Throughout his career Burke has continually called into question the idea that the camera is, or could ever be, a disinterested tool, objective recorder of events, or device for the scientific collection of data. Instead, he revels in the inherent subjectivity of the photographic image, making art and books with a vitality that comes from being as untidy and irreducible as the world around us.
The Destrukto photos are large color images that riff on photography’s historical use as a tool of scientific inquiry—think of Muybridge’s studies of animal locomotion or Edgerton’s images showing milk droplets frozen in miniature explosions—but, there is little sense of a clinical approach in Burke’s freeze-frame photos showing the burst of glass and debris at the moment a bullet impacts an old camera or the thick spray of froth set spinning as a can of beer is shot with a high-powered rifle. If the spirit of scientific inquiry is present in these photos it is only as a comic foil, an excuse to pursue kinetic thrills, and the joy of wanton destructiveness. Burke’s choice of targets is deliberate. Cans of Spam or Campbell’s soup recall Pop art’s insouciant take on Americana, while iconoclastic images of exploding Nikons and Yashicas make Burke’s irreverence toward the conventions of the photographic medium perfectly clear.
The mayhem of the Destrukto works reminds us that photography was once an adventurous vocation. Bill Burke acknowledges that he was attracted to it because a photographer’s life seemed to be one that combined danger, freedom, and a kind of heroic creativity into a heady and glamorous mix. As he developed his aesthetic in the early seventies he learned from New Journalism, especially photographic practitioners like Robert Frank, Larry Clark, and Danny Seymour, and writers like Hunter S. Thompson. He admired work where artistry and reportage were inseparable and artists who, defying standards that had previously defined quality in their fields, dispensed with the pretense of objective distance in order to present a picture of the world that was bracing, expressive and lyrical.
From this basis Burke developed a style in which his own perceptions and subjectivity are a central part of the work, he has said that, “I came to feel that I was only entitled to report upon my own experience.” This method found its fullest expression in a series of classic books, including They Shall Cast Out Demons, Mine Fields, and I Want to Take Picture. In them Burke’s photographs share space with found imagery, advertising, product labels, film stills, letters, notes, and documents in a riotous montage that does not merely report events, but also communicates something about the place they occurred, Burke’s state-of-mind as he recorded them, and his subsequent reflections and commentary on it all. They Shall Cast Out Demons is far more than a documentary about a snake handling sect in Appalachia—it is a meditation of anthropological scope touching on religion, medicine, science, and healing and on the rituals that develop around them. Mine Fields and I Want to Take Picture, grew out of trips to report on the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. They are powerful, nuanced and wide-ranging works covering Southeast Asia and the complexities of American involvement there in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. The preliminary mock-ups of these books exhibited here are like a retrospective in miniature, and a context for the provocations of the Destrukto series.
For more information about this exhibition please contact Glenn Horowitz Bookseller via email or phone: info@GHbookseller.com, 631-324-5511. You may also visit Bill Burke’s own site: binhfoto.
April 4 to May 20, 2009; reception for the artist 6-8 pm, April 4
Matthew Higgs: Never Look Back / Pressed / Fifteeen People Present Their Favorite Book [after Kosuth]
Matthew Higgs: Never Look Back/Pressed/Fifteen People Present Their Favorite Book [after Kosuth]
Matthew Higgs is an artist, a curator, a writer, a publisher and one of the truly vital forces shaping contemporary art. This an exhibition in three parts, with sections entitled Never Look Back; Pressed; and Fifteen People Present Their Favorite Book [After Kosuth], which demonstrates the variety of his creative work. A new artist’s book documenting this portion of the exhibition is now available. To obtain a copy, contact us directly or place an order at abebooks.
Never Look Back is an exhibition of new work; it consists of framed book pages and photographs of books that are framed and hung on gallery walls. They are readymade art objects unaltered but for their re-contextualization as art. Higgs works with their text, layout and design to make art that is by turns playful, wry, knowing, or reflective.
Pressed is an exhibition of letterpress prints by Cary Leibowitz, Peter Doig, Kay Rosen, Dave Muller, Rirkrit Tiravanija and others, including several published by White Columns, an alternative exhibition space in New York City where Higgs has been the director and head curator since 2004.
The central orienting point for the show is an installation of books entitled Fifteen People Present Their Favorite Book [After Kosuth]. This is a re-staging of a little known work by Joseph Kosuth from 1967 in which Kosuth took books chosen by Carl Andre, Robert Morris, Sol Lewitt and others and presented them as an installation in the Lannis Gallery. By re-staging this pioneering piece of conceptual art (this time using books chosen by Wade Guyton, Adam McEwen, Richard Prince and others) Higgs is both calling attention to an overlooked piece of art history, and using it to signal toward the conceptual underpinnings of his own work. Fifteen People Present Their Favorite Book [After Kosuth] is a work of art but also an act of curation. It has not been made in the usual sense and so it blurs the line between the creative work of an artist and that of a curator. And, as a work after Kosuth, it makes no claim of originality but relies instead on an appropriated idea.
By failing in such an exemplary way to be a skillfully made and original work, Higgs’ installation creates a series of challenges to traditional definitions of art. The questions it raises are fundamental to any understanding of the multi-faceted work Higgs has made throughout his career. By ignoring the usual boundaries that would delineate the role of the artist, the curator, the writer, et cetera, Matthew Higgs has defined a singular role for himself and thereby become a figure of central importance in the art world today.
Matthew Higgs is represented by Murray Guy Gallery in New York City and director of White Columns, which celebrated its fortieth anniversary this year. For more information about the artist or this exhibition please contact Glenn Horowitz Bookseller via email or phone: info@GHbookseller.com, 631-324-5511.
Various Homages to Ed Ruscha
Though it is not quite accurate to say Ed Ruscha invented the artist’s book—that would neglect several others who can also claim some credit—but his laconically titled, apparently artless little books with their instantly recognizable design and typography established the template for artist’s books as we know them today. Even so, it is striking how many artists have since made books specifically referencing his. The publication of Burning Small Fires may have made Bruce Nauman the first to contest and acknowledge Ruscha’s model with a book of his own but he was hardly the last. This catalog compiles eleven other books that together demarcate a typology. In a nod to a well-known motif it might be called “Ruscha standard.” Collectively these books demonstrate the degree to which the straightforward “huh” inducing plainness of Ruscha’s formidable precedent continues to shape the ongoing development of the artist’s book. For a copy of the catalog please get in touch with us via email: info@GHbookseller.com
November 15, 2008 to January 5, 2009
Jason Polan: Points of Interest
Jason Polan draws from life and with deft lines and a characteristically straightforward manner quickly captures a subject’s defining features. He is continually making drawings as part of ongoing projects that catalog the world and record an artistic engagement with his environment. The work is one part conceptualism, work made to document a transitory moment of artistic performance, and one part folk tradition—a useful craft employed to inventory items of value or interest. This melding of a rigorously intellectual conceptual art tradition with the artisanship of a commercial draftsman or street-corner caricaturist is what makes Polan’s work unique—his drawings have immediacy and appeal, like pop art re-invented. Polan’s drawing projects include Every Work of Art in the Museum of Modern Art, 132 Birds at The American Museum of Natural History,Favorite Things About New York (for Esopus Magazine, in which he responded to 100 reader-submitted favorites by heading out into the city and making drawings www.esopusmag.com) and his ongoing, impossible-to-complete, project “Every Person in New York” which can be seen at http://everypersoninnewyork.blogspot.com/
Polan’s exhibition at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller records an exploration he has made of the East Hampton area over the past few months and culminates with a week-long drawing project in the gallery during which he will produce drawings related to books, illustrations, and other items in the shop as well as to nearby “Points of Interest” from the East Hampton environs. Polan’s new book, entitled Points of Interest (East Hampton, NY), has been published by Glenn Horowitz Bookseller and will be released in conjunction with the show. There is also limited edition version of the book consisting of a signed and numbered copy accompanied by a “Point of Interest” signpost hand-painted by Polan as if to suggest that designating new things as points of interest can be taken up by viewers as an ongoing project of their own. The book and limited edition are available through Glenn Horowitz Bookseller and at www.abebooks.com.
For more information go to www.jasonpolan.com, or contact Glenn Horowitz Bookseller at 631-324-5511, or by email at info@GHbookseller.com.
To read a review of the Jason Polan, Points of Interest from the East Hampton Star, November 28, 2008, please click here for a PDF.
September 20th to November 10th,2008
Kate Shepherd: Stack Shack
Walk into an art gallery and it goes without saying that a “Don’t Touch” rule will be rigidly enforced. Stores are a more hands-on experience—browse, and paw the merchandise a bit as you make up your mind. Kate Shepherd had the looser rules of a retail environment in mind as she went about making work to exhibit amidst the first editions, artist’s books and other wares available at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller. She has made a group of works that come with an open invitation to violate the don’t touch rule: stackable painted block toys, wooden jigsaw puzzles, and a group of utilitarian-looking boxes that even have built-in hand holds. Alongside these are more traditional paintings, prints, and drawings that, though not designed to be handled, nonetheless have a definite tactile dimension. Visually, they draw as much from everyday experience (wood-working, poster shops, construction sites) as they do from the formal, Minimalist tradition with which Shepherd has frequently been linked. And, in a decisive break with the usual convention wherein works may sell but nonetheless remain pure and inviolate in the gallery space till the show’s appointed end, Shepherd has stipulated that a cash-and-carry sales policy be in effect throughout the exhibition. Come on in, the Stack Shack is open for business, our friendly sales staff is eager to help, and if you find something you like it can be driven off the lot today.
Kate Shepherd was born in 1961 in New York City, where she currently lives and works. Her solo exhibitions include: In In the Spring, Anthony Meier Fine Art (San Francisco, 2008); No Title Here, Galerie Lelong (New York, 2007); Puzzles Cards and Blocks, Barbara Krakow Gallery (Boston, 2005); Lannan Foundation (Santa Fe, 1999); Chinati Foundation (Marfa, 1996). For more information contact us at 631-324-5511, or info@GHbookseller.com, go to www.kateshepherd.com.
June 28th through August 3rd, 2008
Kevin Teare: Bumpology, the Clinton Years
Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by Kevin Teare. Teare admits to a perhaps unhealthy level of preoccupation with covert U.S. history, English rock bands from the 60s, and other matters pop or political. You wouldn’t immediately know it to look at his paintings—gorgeous abstract compositions of shape and color floating on pale expanses of primed canvas—but titles like There Are Exactly 57 Reds (for John Frankenheimer), which alludes to both a notorious quotation from Senator Joe McCarthy and to Frankenheimer’s film The Manchurian Candidate, suggest that Teare’s paintings are operating on other levels besides those immediately apparent. Teare’s fascination with an issue or event is usually the conceptual point of departure as he starts a new painting. He may even include signifying text on the canvas as he begins, but in working he gradually effaces all that is verbal and so as to expunge from the painted space any outside references or editorial agendas. Somehow though, all this mental activity remains encoded in the painting; an invisible but palpable ghost in the machine enlivens the physical traces that remain on the canvas.
Teare has acknowledged the influence of Cy Twombly on his work. Twombly’s dense thickets of indecipherable marks often look less like brushstrokes than scrawled handwriting and he frequently takes his titles from classical texts or ancient mythology. Teare’s precisely rendered shapes of color also allude to language in that they seem to be glyphic characters from some private alphabet while his titles refer not to Virgil but to a kind of popular mythology composed of Beatlemania, the Kennedy assassination, and other epoch-making events of the past 50 years. As with Twombly, a great part of the interest in Teare’s painting derives from the tension he creates between the suggestion of translatability and his ultimate refusal to divulge specific meanings. Their significance is not in any literal interpretation, but in the way that painting is used to process experience into something beyond words. For Teare, painting is a way of addressing himself to ideas and issues without the limitations of language. “The end,” he says, “is often open.”
Kevin Teare lives and works in Sag Harbor, NY. His first exhibition was at The Indianapolis Museum of Art in 1975 and at the age of 25 he was awarded a National Endowment Fellowship for painting. Since then he has exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide. Also an accomplished musician, Teare played drums in the seminal No-Wave band, MX-80. In 1999 he released a record entitled The List of Who Lives, which MOJO Magazine called “one of the three or four best self-produced albums of the millennium.” Besides Teare, the record features such guest performers as Wayne Kramer (MC5) and Richard Lloyd (Television). Teare is a 2006 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Fellowship award for painting. An exhibition of his work entitled The Most High will show at Guild Hall in East Hampton, NY in the fall of 2009. For more information contact Glenn Horowitz Bookseller via email, info@GHbookseller.com, or phone, 631-324-5511.
June 28th to August 3rd, 2008
Matthew Cusick: From What I’ve Read
Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Matthew Cusick, an artist who uses archival materials of all sorts—from antique maps to Hollywood films—as the raw material for paintings, collages and video works. Two simultaneous processes are always occurring in Cusick’s work: he fragments information, studies and sorts it, then remakes it into images as he fashions the fragments into intricately inlaid collages. On one hand, this mode of working reflects his interest in the way the mind works, the way knowledge is acquired and the way language predetermines how ideas are constructed, while on the other it allows him to alter and comment on the content with which he is working by recombining the original material and framing it in new and provocative ways.
Throughout this exhibition Cusick is concentrating on material closely bound to his own personal history, specifically the historical, literary and religious texts of his parochial school education. For instance, he constructed a large piece entitled Ether from two books—a mosaic of pages from an old Western Civilization textbook forms the ground and a dense cloud of forms cut from the pages of a Catholic school bible proliferates above. Each of the foreground shapes has the appearance of a parachute and altogether they suggest the invasion of an immense airborne force. Cusick’s dissection of the books seems to enact the rebellious thoughts of an irreverent student frustrated by the classroom’s arbitrary logic and inconsistent teachings (and it is no coincidence that he cut up a bible printed in 1981, the same year he was expelled from parochial school). Meanwhile the image Cusick constructs in Ether re-frames the conflicting lessons he was taught in terms of warfare. The image is especially appropriate because much of Cusick’s work also stages another kind of battle, that between visual and verbal modes of thought. The cut-up
method has been used in writing and art as—to use the metaphor of William Burroughs, one of the technique’s notable proponents—an inoculation against the language virus. Cusick is up to something like this when he subjects printed material to a new visual order. Grammar is displaced and language re-ordered according to tonality, form and other purely visual criteria in order to undermine the power of rhetorical structures and allow new meanings to emerge.
The show takes as its title a phrase, ‘from what I’ve read,’ that is forever popping up in conversation. Its ubiquity reflects our common habits of mind, the way we all cull information from disparate sources, synthesize it into more-or-less true ideas of the world, make up and amend the provisional operating systems with which we deal with the moment-by-moment business of living. Cusick takes tangled threads of thought and reduces, reconfigures and refines it all into elegant visual distillations. The pieces in this exhibition range in size from a few inches to over eight feet wide; they are mischievous, cerebral, playful, satisfyingly dense, and frequently achieve a startling clarity.
Matthew Cusick was born in New York City, received his BFA from Cooper Union, and now lives and works in Denton, Texas. His work has been exhibited throughout the U.S. and internationally and is held in numerous public and private collections. His work may also be seen in 1968-2008, the Culture of Collage, a retrospective of contemporary collage now showing at Pavel Zoubok Gallery in New York City. For more information contact Glenn Horowitz Bookseller: info@GHbookseller.com, 631-324-5511.
August 10th, 2008 from 5 to 7pm
Book release party for Wives, Wheels, Weapons
On Sunday August 10th, from 5-7 pm, join Glenn Horowitz Bookseller in celebrating the latest release of JMc & GHB Editions: James Frey’s Wives, Wheels, Weapons. Published as a companion volume to Frey’s latest novel, Bright, Shiny Morning (Harper Collins, 2008), Wives, Wheels, Weapons is an artists’ book made in collaboration with Terry Richardson and Richard Prince. The book excerpts three vignettes, “Wives”, “Wheels”, and “Weapons,” from Frey’s novel and presents them alongside a photo essay by photographer Terry Richardson. The hardcover edition features dust-jacket images by Richard Prince. Frey, Richardson and Prince will attend and copies of the book will be available for signing.
The book contains historical vignettes of LA, tracing its corruption and its foibles, until - as always happens in the best novels - the city itself becomes a character; a wild and volatile multi-tentacled beast capable of bestowing great hurt (and the odd chunk of real love) on those who are enmeshed in it.--Irvine Welsh, The Guardian.
Wives, Wheels, Weapons is an edition of 2,000, of which 1,000 hardcover and 1,000 softcover copies have been released simultaneously. Hardcover: $75; softcover: $45.
August 9th to September 15th, 2008
Adam McEwen: Chicken or Beef?
Adam McEwen’s work is concerned with revitalizing our senses by drawing attention to the pervasive dullness of our usual visual experience. He works in a peripatetic variety of media, but the sense of déja vu is his consistent throughout. The more familiar the object the better it serves as a handy trope for re-awakening perception. The work combines a Pop sensibility with a wry sense of humor. His series of obituaries celebrating the lives of (still living) individuals like Kate Moss and Richard Prince brought him wide recognition and scrutiny at the 2006 Whitney Biennial. These darkly humorous works play off of celebrity culture and call attention to the usually overlooked codes that are embedded within conventional mass media, while invoking tragic mortality and its attendant glamour in a context disassociated from actual reality.
Contexts and concepts aside, McEwen’s work serves to reconnect us with the objects we are viewing. He is working to overcome a prevailing numbness. The door signs, text messages, sound bites and other mundane objects he throws before us are quickened into new life by being cast outside their conventional roles. The patina of cultural reference many of his works hold – allusions to other artists and artworks – stalls somewhat as the pieces break any fluid connection with predecessors. Text works that deliberately repeat themselves sound like stuttering versions of Ruschas or Weiners. Sculptured halogen lightbulbs invoke work by Jasper Johns but insist upon their status as a halogen bulb, i.e. longer lasting, requiring less juice. The graphite material which makes up the sculptured pieces in this show might just as easily have been used to make a drawing or an image of what is presented. Eschewing one form of conventional illusion-making it serves to “become” the object. Or rather something like the invoked object. And really, using graphite to draft a contemporary text message just does not compute.
Adam McEwen was born in Great Britain. He took a B.A. at Oxford in English Literature before attending the California Institute of the Arts at Valencia, CA. He has written on the arts for Frieze magazine and has worked as curator of several shows, notably “Beneath the Underdog” at Gagosian Gallery NY in 2007 with Nate Lowman. His work has been shown in numerous group and solo exhibitions including at the Whitney Museum, NYC, PS1 LIC, and the Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery NYC. He lives and works in New York City.
May 24th to June 25th, 2008
David Levinthal:
A Wild Romance. Work from the Eighties.
Into the production of a toy there goes a great many presumptions. Shorn of any worrying content, anything that might be too serious, troublesome or adult, toys are a repository of unexamined cultural information. After his first experiment using military models and toy soldiers in the photographic project Hitler Moves East, David Levinthal found himself increasingly drawn to the use of toys in his art. Precisely because of their apparent blandness, toys offered a perfect starting point for an exploration of the standard narratives and mythologies embedded within popular imagery. Wild Romance is an exhibition of vintage photographs from two groundbreaking series that Levinthal made in the 1980s: Modern Romance (1983–1985); and The Wild West (1986-88).
In Modern Romance, Levinthal trains his lens on figurines and environments of leisure. Curvaceous young women, some escorted by men, other set amidst comfortable domestic surroundings, are pictured using Levinthal’s characteristic device of a shortened depth of field so that all takes on a blurred and dreamy softness. Settings, clothing and hairstyles hint at the 1950s, an age of American prosperity and burgeoning self confidence, as well as suburbanization, straightened social roles and inequality. Colors are mostly soft and bright – ice cream and sherbet hues – bleached by an excess of light. Levinthal used Ektacolor retouching dyes to achieve the subtle colorization in these works and the delicate tints are both expressive and atmospheric, with tones of ivory, sepia and faded silver contributing to a sense of cloying nostalgia. Comfortable as these images seem, nearly all of them contain an undercurrent of psychological tension. As in the paintings of Edward Hopper, there is not only tranquility, but also dread, in the preternatural stillness.
The Wild West is a series of photographic images rendered via the Scanamural process. Scanamural, an analogue process anticipating the digital printing revolution which has since revolutionized the scale and quality of photographic art, used a photo-transparency and acrylic paint to transfer an image onto a large-scale canvas. With a palette of ominous blacks and incendiary reds these images depict scenes of action and conflict peopled by cowboys and indians, distressed ladies, townsfolk, and other stock western types. Levinthal evokes the epic scale and Technicolor look of the classic Hollywood westerns even as his miniaturized rendition of the usual frontier myths called into question the simplistic good and evil narratives and the notions of freedom and valor by which the old films operated. Coming as it did in the last years of Reagan’s cowboy-inflected presidency, this was a subtly subversive series of images. Their importance and their relevance have only grown since then.
David Levinthal was born in San Francisco, CA in 1949. His major projects include Hitler Moves East (1977), Modern Romance (1986), The Wild West (1989), American Beauties (1990), Desire (1991), Mein Kampf (1994), Blackface (1996), Barbie Millicent Roberts (1999), XXX (1999), Netsuke (2002), and Baseball (2003). He has been the recipient of numerous important arts prizes and fellowships, his work has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally, and has been collected by numerous institutions. He lives and works in New York City.
April 12th to May 22nd, 2008
Adam Stennett: Off the Grid
Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Brooklyn-based artist Adam Stennett. This show consists of new works on paper, sculpture and video, all thematically organized around the idea that the way we look at the world determines what we see. This exhibition, entitled Off the Grid, is anchored by a series of still-lifes which re-imagine the possibilities of a stuffy and traditional genre while the video and sculptural works invoke secret government projects, psychedelic drugs, and the culture wars of the 1960s.
The paintings are elegantly composed and beautifully drawn but their outwardly staid appearance is a misdirection. Stennett’s real program is to reinvent the tropes of still-life and retrofit the genre for renewed contemporary relevance. To do so he returned to still-life’s earliest origins and the Netherlandish masters who gave weight and meaning to each piece of fruit, shank of meat, flower, bowl or bottle they painted, thereby making still life the study of character and narrative by other means. Likewise, Stennett presents objects as if they are to be read as evidence. He paints opium poppies, nutmeg kernels, or hallucinogenic morning glories, with teapots, grinders, strainers, bottles of solvent or grain alcohol. These are materials and tools for the extraction of specific euphoric agents that reside within common plants, seeds and tins of spice. These works are not so much still-lifes as painted recipes, precise visual demonstrations by which the observant may be initiated into all sorts of covert activities.
Traditional still-lifes often aimed to calm by suggesting comfort and domestic tranquility but Stennett makes work that undermines calm. This series encourages the imagination to conjure a monster: part vigilante, part amateur pharmacologist, someone knowledgeable and resourceful, but solitary, secretive, at odds with society and given to violence, self-medication and paranoia. In the end the work defies precise interpretation but it is clear that there is an unseen presence at the conceptual center of the exhibition. Collectively these works form a composite portrait of a contemporary anti-hero, as erratic and volatile as the images themselves are composed and contained. That we are never shown a face, only allowed to sense an elusive presence, makes the experience all the more unnerving.
Accompanying the works on paper are video and sculptural works that take a mischievous look at those who have made research into altered consciousness. The sculptural pieces display team jerseys in orderly upright ranks, as if squared off for a competition. The “teams,” MK-Ultra and Millbrook, make reference to groups that did early LSD testing; the first is a classified government program and the second a community founded by Timothy Leary in a wealthy town of upstate New York. Such research has provided fodder for conspiracy theorists while generally revealing more about the ideologies of those who formulated the studies than about altered consciousness itself. The notion that methods inevitably color conclusions subtly informs every piece in the exhibition. Pinned to a wall of Stennett’s studio is an excerpt from the report of another study--it dryly notes how substances that ordinarily provoke nothing more than dizziness can, when aligned with the ideology and expectations of a particular individual, just as well lead to states of profound euphoria. To Stennett this is a metaphor for the peculiar alchemy by which art transforms images and objects into devices for the expansion of consciousness.
Adam Stennett was born in Kotzebue, Alaska in 1972, grew up in Oregon, and now lives in Brooklyn. His work is in numerous public and private collections and has been widely exhibited in the U.S. and internationally. He is represented by 31GRAND in New York City. For more information about the artist or this exhibition please contact Glenn Horowitz Bookseller via email: info@GHbookseller.com, or by telephone: 631-324-5511.
Follow these links for press about Adam Stennett’s exhibition in Whitehot Magazine and in Style.com
January 26th to April 2nd, 2008
Mark Wilson: Life in Dead of Winter
Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is pleased to announce the debut of a new project that will transform our gallery space for a period of 10 weeks beginning January 26, 2008. Mark Wilson uses art to interact with the dynamism of the earth. His new installation--a single work composed of paintings and sculptural objects--is a place to encounter the power and sublimity of nature’s enduring forces.
The geologic energies that govern land and sea and the cycles and seasons that coordinate life are always apparent but rarely consciously engaged. The world is simple, an endless series of bluntly physical things, yet also mysterious in the way it ultimately remains just beyond the mind’s grasp. This mystery exercises a powerful fascination and many are drawn to pastimes (gardening, cooking, fishing, hiking) that directly and viscerally engage with the world. Wilson surfs. He also makes sculpture from driftwood recovered from the ocean and paintings using a pendulum-based apparatus that harnesses gravity and centripetal force to spin elegant threads of color onto a surface.
Wilson incorporates the elemental lure of the “hands-on” into his art; the basic human need to grasp hold of the physical world is central to his aesthetic. His sculpture doubles as furniture; it can be touched and stands up to regular use. His driftwood constructions take the form of benches, chairs, tables and shelves. To touch or sit on one of these objects is to awaken to the metaphorical resonance of the material. Driftwood is a product of tide and current, it carries a trace of the sea and an installation largely built from this material naturally becomes a place to consider the vast oceanic systems that encircle globe. The other component of the installation is a series of paintings and wallpaper with a recurring abstract circular motif. The paintings are made by harnessing gravity and centripetal force and so embody the cycles of nature. Most are dark and inky with pale color emerging like starlight from the night sky and like a crisp starry night they tend to induce a contemplative state of mind. One large canvas, positioned at the far fringe of the installation, breaks with this color scheme: it is bright solar orange and suggests daybreak, or perhaps the idea of coming summer imagined in mid-January.
Antecedents such as Carl Andre (who said, ‘my idea of a sculpture is a road’) and Joseph Beuys (‘I think the tree is an element of regeneration which in itself is a concept of time’) are clearly in evidence, but Wilson’s work is equally inspired by ancient shamanic and mystical practices as it is by contemporary art and architectural work. This installation is a place for a mid-winter reverie, an artistic meditation on the regenerative processes that occur when days are short and weather cold.
Mark Wilson has shown at Tony Shafrazi, Fawbush, and White Columns in New York, as well as other venues throughout the US, Europe, and Australia. His work is in numerous public and private collections. In 1992 he was the recipient of a prestigious grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. For more information or images please email info@GHbookseller.com
December 1st, 2007 to January 15th, 2008
Baptiste Ibar: The Doors
Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is pleased to present Baptiste Ibar’s first major solo exhibition, a group of new paintings, works on paper, and a sculptural installation. Ibar is a young artist on the cusp of broader recognition, a prolific talent with multi-disciplinary gifts--he released an album of music in October, 2007 (www.bananaapplerecords.com) and his drawings werefeatured prominently in Michel Gondry’s film (and subsequent art exhibition) The Science of Sleep. Ibar’s paintings are the product of a visionary visual sensibility coupled with a Blakean conception of history. The work in this show collectively forms a series entitled The Doors. The name refers simultaneously to the everyday and to the transcendent; to the discarded doors that Ibar has found and incorporated into his paintings as well as to ‘doors of perception,’ the investigation of which Ibar, like Blake, Huxley and others before him, has made the basis of his artwork.
Baptiste Ibar’s work combines expressionistic figuration with brightly-colored abstract passages. It incorporates collaged elements and is built up in layers with certain motifs recurring within a single work or evolving from work to work. The work is inventive and filled to overflowing with varied visual incident, but made with an unfailing compositional sense so that even the most complex pieces remain striking and graphic. Ibar’s work recalls a variety of antecedents. Ibar’s abstract passages evoke Paul Klee’s tremulous geometry, shimmering color and musical sense of order while the feral strength of his line and the graffiti-inspired layering and re-working of imagery suggests Basquiat.
Currently based in Brooklyn, Ibar developed as part of an extraordinarily vibrant and already legendary arts community that emerged in Providence in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The Providence scene coalesced in a decrepit warehouse district known as Olneyville, where proximity to the Rhode Island School of Design combined with an abundance of cheap loft space and lead to an explosion of creativity. Providence was filled with arts collectives, painters, poster artists and animators making work in shocking bright colors, noise bands charting complex aural territory at deafening volume, graffiti, happenings, performances, installations and other artistic activity, all realized with a free-form, multidisciplinary and collaborative approach. Most of this activity took place in several gigantic loft spaces and semi-legal squats, the most famous of which, named Fort Thunder, was razed in 2001. It was a period characterized by the attitude and anarchism of punk, the psychedelic era’s color palette, and a taste for creative bedlam reminiscent of the Merry Pranksters. It was a unique fusion, a particularly energetic brand of contemporary dada. ‘Alumni’ of this community, largely free of the usual MFA-program orthodoxies, have since been making some of the most compelling work in the contemporary art world. In 2002 the arts collective Forcefield was included in the Whitney Biennial. Since then several solo exhibitions and numerous group shows have featured Providence (and post-Providence) work.
Baptiste Ibar was born outside Paris in 1977. He has lived in the United States since childhood and is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design.
October 20th to November 27th, 2007
Now Playing
Artists Borrow from Film
Opening Reception October 20 from 6-8 pm. Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is pleased to announce an exhibition of work by a selection of contemporary artists all of whom have borrowed ideas, visual tropes, and modes of working from the movies. The show examines the centrality of the cinema in contemporary culture and has a particular focus on the popular mythology surrounding the making of movies. This is not a film and video show. This is a show about the impact of filmmaking on contemporary art and the many ways that artists have drawn on our collective knowledge of film culture to extend the aesthetic possibilities of existing artistic forms. The exhibition includes work by Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, David Levinthal, Richard Prince, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Jan de Cock, Josh Shaddock, Ryan McGinley, Matthew Cusick and Jeremy Blake.
The exhibition is anchored by two vintage prints from screen-tests by Andy Warhol. In Warhol’s early foray into filmmaking he characteristically eschews all narrative, editing, and camera movement and instead re-creates a piece of the old Hollywood studio system. The screen-test was the divining rod of the early moguls, a mythical contrivance used in the ‘discovery’ of stars--Warhol’s cool re-deployment of this device sets the standard for all artists who would later borrow from the filmmaker’s behind-the-scenes toolkit.
The show includes work by a quartet of contemporary masters who have revolutionized current art practice through direct engagement with our collective visual culture, especially images and ideas from film. Cindy Sherman has made some of the most iconic artworks of the late 20th century by applying a (fictional) filmic context to her photographs. Her Film Stills imbue static images with suggestions of narrative, character and dramatic action. David Levinthal was among the first artists to forge a new postmodernist photographic tradition. Like the old Hollywood FX wizards who could create a naval battle in a bathtub, Levinthal stages scenes with miniature figures and suggests vast cinematic tableau through the playful application of camera effects from the cinematographer’s bag of tricks. Likewise, Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s career has been a continual investigation of photographic tradition, using staged scenes and studio lighting to both undermine and reinvigorate documentary and verite modes of working. Richard Prince is the master appropriationist, borrowing liberally from society’s image bank and putting the mythologies operant in film and advertising to subversive new uses.
Also included are five emerging artists who are now expanding on this tradition of borrowing tools and techniques from film culture. Jeremy Blake, his career now cut-short by his tragic suicide, had been exploring the possibilities opened when painterly abstraction acquired film’s added dimension of movement and time. Jan de Cock, subject of an upcoming exhibition at MoMA, juxtaposes objects and installs sculptural elements as framing devices in existing environments. By mimicking the framing and montage techniques of a film director his installations alter one’s experience of real time and space. Josh Shaddock uses a sound designer’s methodology to make a piece of visual slapstick about the telling of jokes and Matthew Cusick went into the editing studio to create a you-are-there thrill ride of vehicular mayhem that simultaneously functions as a seven-minute historical survey of escapism and wish fulfillment in the movies. Ryan McGinley’s lush images of transfixed fans at Morrissey concerts rely on an implied ‘soundtrack’ to go with the photographs and thereby change their aesthetic content to something beyond the merely documentary. Instead, the series becomes a meditation on a phenomenon well known any cinephile: that emotional transport we experience singly even as we sit amongst the crowd of a theater.
September 15th to October 16th, 2007
Jameson Ellis
The Atomic Sublime
Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Jameson Ellis. In the past century a few artists in each generation have found a way to re-invent the formal language of abstraction to suit the concerns of the age. Jameson Ellis draws on a range of antecedents—Stella’s regular, mechanical surfaces, Gerhard Richter’s dragged and smeared canvases, Rothko’s fields of color, Bridget Riley’s repetitive optical effects—but in the end they look only like themselves. These are not just pleasing arrangements of color, nor are they inward–looking expressions of emotional states, instead they look outward at the world the clear-eyed perspective of history and raise questions about the future. Ellis makes innovative, ambitious work. He pushes at the bounds of the medium and strives for an abstract idiom relevant to our time.
Ellis looks to the dawn of the atomic age and the representative images of the era—jet contrails, mushrooms clouds, the rolling static of an early television set, aerial views of sprawling suburban developments, superhighways and cloverleaf interchanges—and distills these forms to the point of near total abstraction.
The form of the work supports its content. Ellis has developed a complex mechanical process to sweep color in smooth bands and jagged breaks across the painting’s surface. They have a stark, machined appearance and almost no trace of the hand. The palette is vibrant: pinks, yellows, aquas and other bright synthetic hues. They have a tremendous visual appeal but the tonalities are too hot to be mere eye-candy; these colors burn.
His aesthetic might be termed “The Atomic Sublime.” His subject is a quintessentially modern one: the awe of seeing certain immense, human-generated forces, those technologies which in their sheer scale and power compel us to search for new terms appropriate to the experience. Upon seeing the first successful atomic weapons tests, Robert Oppenheimer grasped for a way to express his awe and found it in the words of the Hindu deity Vishnu, “now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” Portentous and terrifying but also lyrical, his words suggest that he sensed beauty as well as fear as he looked at the atomic cloud rising over the desert. This notion--that even something as frightening as a 10 megaton test blast can be beautiful if seen from a far enough distance--is the essence of the sublime and it is the core of Ellis’ aesthetic. His work provides a meditative space from which to consider and come to terms with the arbitrary forces and inhuman beauties that increasingly confront contemporary experience.
They are visually seductive but not in order to be merely decorative or to retreat from that which is difficult to look at. Ellis’s paintings operate through dissonance. Their purpose is to contain disquiet.
August 4th to September 10th, 2007
Philip-Lorca diCorcia
Printed Matters
Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is pleased to announce announce an exhibition of new works by Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Printed Matters, curated by Thea Westreich and Ethan Wagner.
Taken from the contents of diCorcia’s 2003 book project, A Storybook Life, the works in this show were not made by any overt action on the part of the photographer, but came about accidentally as part of the printing process for the book. These images are the result of a proofing procedure typical in book publishing where a finite number of paper sheets are run through the press to ascertain sharpness of image, color absorption, and registration accuracy. The sheets are run through once on one side, flipped, run through again, and often re-flipped and run again producing a visual effect like a double exposure, an over-printing. Normally these pages are discarded once the printers are satisfied with the results, but diCorcia found himself captivated by the resultant imagery and held on to the proof sheets. Since then his interest in the special qualities of juxtaposed images which actually contact each other has developed. The layering effect, creating the proximity of ordinarily unrelated subjects, opens up greater worlds of narrative intrigue and complicates the field of meaning, two themes at the core of the photographer’s practice.
From more than 100 impressions diCorcia has selected 20 for this show, presenting them as “found” artist’s works. In doing so, as well as broadening the confines of his traditional discipline, he elaborates on his own familiar concerns of subject and interpretation, of control and accident as they feature in the photographic process. In one
image a scene inside a funeral parlor is overlaid with a photograph of a man standing in a low room who reaches up to touch the ceiling. Both in their own right are apparently commonplace enough images, but in combination they conjure an extra dimensional realm of narrative and interpretation. For diCorcia the contact of these two disparate images owns a peculiarly personal resonance as the overlapping figures portray his brother and his late father. An eerie “spiritual” flavor pervades. This overlay of figures from different photographs recalls a process popularly exploited at the beginning of the last century when portraits were devised that appeared to show spectral contacts between the sitter and deceased loved ones. This transcendental feel to diCorcia’s images is not without an ironic undertow given that these works exist merely by virtue of the fact of mechanical accident.
The “Storybook Life” element of these images is enhanced as we confront everyday scenes, already distinctly charged with diCorcia’s signature theatricality, now overlaid with a secondary scene. The mind and eye helplessly initiate a narrative connection, a story on top of a story, even while teasing apart the distinct details of one image from another. The picture spaces merge and new meaning is born in a world where objective rules struggle to prevail; interior becomes exterior, past invades present, and the cool impersonal scene crackles with a personalized sense of the moment. In these arresting impressions diCorcia has phrased the question neatly once again; are we looking at layers of imagery or just looking through the veils of our own experience?
Over the last thirty years diCorcia’s work has famously addressed the seemingly contradictory aspects of straight-faced documentation and personalized representation as they apply inherently to the acts of making and viewing a photograph. He has been widely acknowledged as one of the most influential photographers of his generation. The recipient of numerous honors and awards, his work has been shown at one person shows nationally and internationally, including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; the Centre National de la Photographie, Paris; and the Sprengel Museum, Hannover.
“The conscious and subconscious decisions made in editing the photographs is the real work of A Storybook Life,” diCorcia has said, but he might as easily have said it about his photographic process and its subject. More simply yet, the title of his book spells it out. For more information about the exhibition please contact us.
June 30th to July 31th, 2007
Will Cotton: Drawings
Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works on paper by Will Cotton. These images, all produced within the past year, add to an expanding body of work detailing Cotton’s primary aesthetic obsession - the representation of pleasure. In the past Cotton produced lavish, mouth-watering images of candy fantasy lands- forests and caverns composed of chocolate, lollipops and ice cream – but has more recently begun to populate these utopian confectionary landscapes with gorgeous, eroticized female figures, as realistically represented as the impossible environments they seem so at home in. These lithe-limbed beauties appear almost as one with their delectable surroundings, as inviting and reassuring as the candy worlds they inhabit, as innocent, melting and available as taffy. Their untroubled countenances defy the viewer to find anything here that is less than simple, less than sweet. And perhaps because of this candid simplicity, the viewer is thrown back upon themselves and the question looms large - how free and uninhibited are our own desires?
The drawings in oil and varnish display a graceful, fluid style, an exuberant gestural freedom that belies the carefully honed craftsmanship of a hand and eye that, while deft, is never less than exacting in its requirements. Studies made from some of Cotton’s earlier works – Candy Forest (Study) from a painting of 2005 entitled Candy Stick Forest – denote an artist who is serious about understanding issues of draftsmanship and composition. Only with concentration and effort can the illusion of such easy spontaneity be brought about. The earthy monochrome pallet of this work gives the drawings a gravitas and groundedness absent in Cotton’s brightly hued, hyper-idealized painted works; there is a haunting quality to some of these scenes that is less apparent in the paintings. Something of the Baroque spirit inhabits these pieces, recalling works by Fragonard and other 18th century painters, artists similarly given over to the celebration of life’s pleasures and appetites. And yet in our guilty age, the weight of history bearing down on us, these vistas onto carefree worlds of satiety and indulgence are never without a murmur of anxiety. Eden remains to mock the price we paid for our self-consciousness and the specter of this knowledge hangs over each of these compositions. Bitingly we recall the consequences of what it would be like to gorge ourselves on this sugar-coated wonderland, to fall for one of these spectral girls. Pleasure is fleeting, and all the sweeter for its transience.
Will Cotton was born in Melrose, Massachusetts. His work has been displayed in numerous group and one-person shows throughout the U.S. and Europe. Presently he lives and works in New York City.
May 26th to June 25th, 2007
Jan De Cock: Denkmal 87
Jan De Cock’s first extended installation in the United States opened May 26th at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller in East Hampton. The installation quickly became a more elaborate project than De Cock had originally planned. He first set foot in the space, approximately 60 hours before the show was scheduled to open, intending only to re-configure his installation from last November’s NY Art Book Fair for a new location. That installation consisted of 25 ‘denkmal’ (these are minimalist wooden forms that intentionally evoke the sculpture of Donald Judd) along with potted kentia palms and copies of his artist’s book. But when De Cock looked at the space, and then at the books on the shelves, the art on display and the many other items in storage, he quickly decided to make a more elaborate site-specific installation, something more akin to the ‘occupying the museum’ projects that he has previously made at London’s Tate Modern and other European venues. (His next such piece, which he is currently planning along with curators Peter Galassi and Roxana Marcoci, is scheduled to open at MoMA in January).
De Cock selected books, photos, and objects from the shelves of Glenn Horowitz Bookseller and, by arranging them next to each other, stacking them up, placing them on the denkmal, in display windows and in vitrines, and, by taking pictures of these temporary arrangements made collages that incorporate not only book covers and objects, but, through shadows and reflections, the real space in which they were made. He took the photos on Thursday, printed, matted and framed them on Friday, and on Saturday the show was installed and opened to the public. The process was similar to that of past installations, but more fast-paced, spontaneous and improvisatory.
As Jan determined how he was going to create the installation he set his assistant to recording every book on the shop’s shelves. This document, which ran to 30 pages when complete, is for De Cock what a color palette is to a more traditional artist--raw materials from which art is made. The books and other items he selected to use in the photos and installation all represent aspects of De Cock’s own aesthetic and working methods. Some of the choices relate straightforwardly: Judd books (De Cock’s minimalist approach to the sculptural elements), a Herbert Matter photo of a Brancusi sculpture (stacking of objects as method of making art), an Eisenstein book, a Warhol Cinema catalogue from Centre Pompidou (montage and artistic appropriation of filmic idiom), Friedlander photos (incorporation of shadows, reflections and other traces of the photographer’s presence into the photo), Rodchenko, El Lissitsky, Malevich books (Jan telescopes photographic space in his images to create spare, geometric compositions very much in the mode of these artists). Other connections are more conceptual. De Cock placed two interior design books prominently: Eliot Elisofon’s ‘Hollywood Style’, a book showing the interior spaces of the movie stars, and another volume, even more lavish, showing rooms in the palaces of Versailles. However garish these spaces may seem to contemporary eyes, they nonetheless show how a sensibility expresses itself through the ‘installation’ of art and objects in a given space.
The 30 photos De Cock made as part of the installation are available individually, each is an edition of one. For more information about the exhibition please contact us.
