lion, tiger, darkness, sad, hopeless, good

Result #1

lion, tiger, darkness, sad, hopeless, good <|startoftext|>The loveliness of the title of my first New York solo show, which opened this past January, is not something to be sniffed at. Indeed, it is quite the opposite, for the color and light of the artist John Latham bring to mind a magical age of personal aspiration and the myth of the creative genius. With this in mind, the warm palette, the mineral glazes, and the structural detail are as powerful as the work of any colorist.This year Latham has been exhibiting new, smaller, untitled paintings in his small, midtown gallery, Tivoli. A light and loose brush make for rich surfaces that are impossible to grasp, but that don't feel superficial. In the paintings, the artists touch is sensuous, almost delicately radiant. The colors, including the lush violet-and-magenta palettes that make up the bulk of the show, are strong, with the occasional trace of the brush, the palette knife, the troweled edge of the palette, and the precision of the brushwork. The intensity of Latham seems to be that of his brushwork, not the brush. He does not seem to be attempting to imitate a brushstroke, but rather to communicate the idea of a brushstroke through a luminous touch. The brushstroke, however, is never the point of the gesture. The point of the gesture is the image—the idea that creates the image—and the image is never in the end a picture of a brushstroke. The paintings, with their shimmering violets, vivid blues, and fiery yellows, make the visual experience a special experience of the luminous touch. They are, in fact, a joy to look at, and they take a real pleasure in the process of painting.It is hard to say whether this is Latham at his best or his best to best.

Result #2

lion, tiger, darkness, sad, hopeless, good <|startoftext|>Artists who make an attempt at serious-mannered art can be very easy to hate. To be honest, it seems unfair to place too great a burden on the efforts of a few, who are in any case outsiders to the art world. But, on the other hand, it is the artists who actually make art who should be doing serious-mannered work, not art-world outsider. And the two arent always easy to hate, because it is the outsider who is usually the one doing serious-mannered art, not the artist.I remember a few years ago when I saw a show of work by Harry Callahan. Its a pity that Callahan, who is a really good painter, didnt have the guts to attempt something new, or at least something daring. The show was pretty much a catalogue of one-liners—cartoons, drawn-and-painted photographs, and a couple of paintings. I mean, seriously. There was nothing new in it. One of the paintings, a very good one, was a comic strip with a pair of tigers. Thats all there was to it. Another was a bunch of door keys on a string. Who cares? Theres no point in breaking the law, and that was the way it was. Theres a fine line between putting one's art in a show, and putting one's art in a show. In the case of Callahans show, however, he has crossed the line, and taken the high road. He has stuck his art in a gallery, or, rather, he has stuck it in a gallery on the show. He has put the work on display in a gallery—a third, private space, because, you know, its that distance from the public world that makes it dangerous to put anything in a gallery.

Result #3

lion, tiger, darkness, sad, hopeless, good <|startoftext|>Pamela Kort, The Ambitious White Boy, 2004, still from a color video, 7 minutes. In her best-known work, Pamela Kort is also known for the ordinary (and, sometimes, fantastical) objects she finds in a garage, for her affection for the building as a home. Such is the case with The Ambitious White Boy, 2004, a color video that was made for the opening of her exhibition at Galerie Eva Presenhuber. The footage, shot from the window of an adjacent building, shows an ordinary car, parked on a street in Hamburg, a street littered with trash and broken glass, and a homeless man standing at the driver's door, yet without a key. He motions to the street and peers into the window; the window is only partially closed, and then the car is seen slowly rolling out of the building. The juxtaposition of this car with the homeless man, who sits on a sidewalk, makes a sharp contrast with the affluent car-shop window (even though the homeless person is not actually inside). The juxtaposition is the key to the exhibition, which was as much about the juxtaposition of the everyday as it was about the image. And Kort is no stranger to the quotidian, to the ordinary. Her previous video installations, including the videos that inspired the Ambitious White Boy, have been largely composed of ordinary images—by no means the most common of everyday objects—and, in the case of The Ambitious White Boy, she makes the ordinary function as an image.The show included a few objects that drew on everyday objects. The common, everyday object, like the car, was transformed into a sign, a sign of the everyday, a symbolic representation of the everyday. In one case, the car was transformed into a toy (another everyday object) while in another, it was transformed into a sculpture.

Result #4

lion, tiger, darkness, sad, hopeless, good <|startoftext|>When my friend Lynda Benglis suggested that I should take her photos, I was skeptical. I thought it was a gimmick. Isnt it possible that the more photorealist a picture is, the less photorealist a photographer? What if I photographed a woman in a skimpy T-shirt and panties? Would the rest be as good? In a sense, they would not. Bengliss subjects are typically images of corporate or leisure activity, but they are a society of objects, and thus, of images. This is not to say that we cant do photorealism. The French critic Pierre Restany has written, The T-shirts, the shoes, the bedspread, the bags, the batteries, the keys, the keys of the office, the hotel, the chair—all these objects, they have disappeared into the photographic surface. No doubt, the t-shirt is also the T, but the T-shirt is not so T. The photos are all the same.The photographs on view here were taken in the mid 70s, during a period of contraction and a loss of focus in corporate America. I wonder how the segnyar manages to resist getting into the cyclical motion of the development of the T-shirt, and the T-shirt is also a stylized object. I wonder, if only to stress that the T-shirt is a man-made object, how she manages to resist becoming the commodified T-shirt in the form of a marketing copy, a "brand new object, that commodifies itself. I wonder if Bengliss images are the product of the photorealist who has recently come into the genre of corporate photography. This is to say that the images are of office props, but of a lower standard of technical proficiency.

Result #5

lion, tiger, darkness, sad, hopeless, good <|startoftext|>The work of Jean-Luc Moulène is, in a sense, an art of notes, notes made in the service of art. Thus, in a sense, Moulène is a painter of words. This is especially true of the works of the 70s, which were actually exhibited here in Paris—i.e., between 1967 and 1971. But with the artists work, it becomes clear that the artist has a philosophical basis and that the notes he takes to heart are not mere insights. The same is true of his drawings, which are the work of notes taken by an ordinary person. They are not merely fragments of thought but expressions of it. The originality of the work, its expressiveness, is the sign of an intellectual consciousness, and therefore of a concrete activity. In this sense, Moulènes works have a clear, tangible basis: they are intellectual, and they are fundamental to our sense of reality.The works in this show were created between 1968 and 1971. In 1968, Moulène became involved with the Geometrische Kunstakademie in Vienna, where he created a group of drawings. They consist of small sketches that take place in the course of a conversation, with the artist. They show him to be a very lucid, subtle and systematic draftsman. The drawings, made with oilstick, are like those of an artist in dialogue with himself. They are not just studies or plans but, rather, a manifestation of a certain mental atmosphere. In this way, Moulène shows us that drawings are an important tool for an artist and that they are a regular means of recording his thoughts. The notes, the notes that make up the drawings, the times they are taken, are a kind of diary of the artists position in relation to time and space. These drawings constitute a type of memory, and they bring to mind a text by Joseph Cornell.