Ryan Danny Owen, Bleach painting 2x2', blue denim fades to white.

Result #1

Ryan Danny Owen, Bleach painting 2x2', blue denim fades to white. Today I see paintings as water. . . . June 8, 2014. On May 25, 1958, Lena Heade wrote of the pictures in her famous Manifesto: There is something particularly beautiful about my fellow women, and I wonder why. Perhaps it is that, when seeing her work, I feel as if I can ask, Why? Like the dutiful servants, I am the same as the masters, more and more in power. I am the queen, the femme fatale. This is the parable of the double bind.The image of the room is a photo of Heade painting in her studio, in a brownroom with a newspaper on the ground in front of her, and a small yellow boat for water. The nude woman looks out at the far wall, framed by a white, papier-mâché arch in the shape of a human body, a mirror reflection of herself as she lies in the mud. The scene is drawn out by two horizontal lines that enclose the nude woman, one of the edges of which is bloodred and the other of which looks like a stomach. On the right, a blue-skinned woman, her face obscured, lies on a couch, her hands on her breasts, her legs spread. On the left, a nude man, her hand on his face, holds a stack of paper, pen and ink. It looks like a painting, but also like a drawing—as if the subject were trying to draw.In fact, Heade never painted naked before: The artist always hid her nude models. She painted only her subjects with a broad brush, leaving them bare, but she never gave her subjects this protection. The woman in the room is still covered, but the mirror is empty, indicating that her nakedness was already visible. And we see the human figure again, but in mud.

Result #2

Ryan Danny Owen, Bleach painting 2x2', blue denim fades to white. From left: Lelia Lind, Naked Carousel, 1967; Joe Tatum, Rubble Painting with Jenny Lewis and Andy Warhol, 1965. Photo: William Kenworthy. IN 1967, Morris Hirshfields nascent Postmodernism played a role in spurring a disaffection with pictoriality that remains endemic to the practice of this craft today. At the time, Hirshfields practice, which used Photoshop to produce artworks that captured the viewers attention with their sharp edges and the wide-angle sharpness that Harald Szeemann used to bring to his Photorealist compositions, was dismissed as overdetermined and derivative, while Hou Hanruys critique of the visual worlds influence was labeled a step backward. Yet Hirshfields oeuvre, despite its dilution, holds up well within the history of Postmodernism as the bookends of the 1960s-era discourse on abstract art, however, and he has had a great deal to do with that legacy. Given that Hirshfield is in his mid-forties and has been extensively honored, it is perhaps no coincidence that his first major museum exhibition was at the Art Institutes Black-Scholes Center for the Arts in New York in 2013, just as the artists year-long stay at the Munich Kunsthalle opened.The opening of Black-Scholes Center for the Arts in New York marks a pivotal moment for Hirshfield, a now eighty-two-year-old artist. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the closure of his Berlin gallery Berlinische Galerie in 2011, he relocated his practice to the small port city of Hannover in southern Germany. The move, supported by generous grants from the German government, allowed Hirshfield to pursue his interest in translating visual art into an argument in support of the idea of a kind of aesthetic life, one rooted in the principles of rationalism and democratic socialism.

Result #3

Ryan Danny Owen, Bleach painting 2x2', blue denim fades to white. Installation view, September 1, 2009. If you were to ask any museum director what he or she would have thought of a scene involving a group of hungry vampires, kitchen sinks, and a glazed dish, chances are that the response would be different from those who attend art-world events where this is the usual fare. That, however, does not excuse a determinedly on-topic attitude: Thats what made Richard Billinghams anthrocurate, scholarly exhibition One and Only, which was sandwiched between two readings of his equally juried one-ups—a comics and video installations at the same time—being less than a complete sudserabe. Billinghams work can be viewed as a poetic fantasy that tends to be crafted in the same way he devises his master plan: With such an an approach, his art becomes a logical extension of his lifestyle. <|startoftext|>Allan McCollum, Untitled (Kinky Bodies), 1959–60, casein on paper, 24 x 24". From the series Ballet Choir, 1960–61. Three dancers each will follow a set of instructions given in a different order. Each performance begins with the text: the name and date of your birth; your name, phone number, and color of your birth certificate, if any. Next comes the leotards, which contain lists of all the movements for the three characters on the page. Each listing is printed twice, for each of the three characters. The first list of the three characters is then repeated and repeated, sometimes to a greater or lesser extent, until the third character has been completed. The figures will move in various ways: from one position to another, picking up the third character and moving it to another; from a position to a lower right, hopping over it; and so on.

Result #4

A group of similarly sized paintings of a scantily clad woman in blue jeans and Adidas sneakers—Untitled, 2011—was positioned between two black boxes, one a giant Hula-hoop backdrop, the other a bust of a woman painted to resemble a pop idol. On one hand, you could find a wry comment on the malleability of oppositions (the two were photorealist on a cellphone) or a joke about sexuality (she looked like the next Hedi Slimane), but on the other, the works would have been even more subversive if they werent also a bit obvious—well, not ironic.But if anything, the inclusion of just such subtlety signaled a positive development in the exhibitions overall tone. Maybe the quality of the paintings is enough to counteract the up-and-comer status of their protagonist, or maybe its the people in these paintings that give off that aura of the artist-as-character. But the combination of technical proficiency and superficial analysis is not necessarily a sign of weakness, it is rather an effective means of provoking a certain critical consciousness. Owen starts out with an image, which, when painted over, becomes an abstract image. With such a pretense, the paintings are as relevant as they are contemporary.

Result #5

Ryan Danny Owen, Bleach painting 2x2', blue denim fades to white. Installation view, September 9, 2018. Photo: Luke Harding. © THE ARCHIVE PICTURE CLUB/LA CURAMUS. With the passage of fifty years, Mark Johnson has turned from the space-age visionary to the antiquarian. Though he lives in New York, Johnson has been largely out of the picture in the years since the Manhattan Project, and his art has grown ever more distant from its subject. In the wake of the artists death, the occasional archaeologist might stumble on a few fine specimens, but for the most part the work in his final years has not been particularly interesting. This is partly a function of the current nomenclature of his work: Johnson is not celebrated as such in any broad way, and thus rarely cited by those who most need him remembered. Nor can his art be appreciated in the same way as other artists work. The effect, in short, of just ignoring Johnson has been to deny him a place in the pantheon of visionary avant-garde artists who followed him around throughout his decades-long career, the last decades of his life and that of the Museum of Modern Art, a remarkable (and one may be mistaken) achievement in itself.But the curators made a point of including all kinds of stuff by Johnson, who wasnt really a great artist to begin with; they also paid homage to his lifelong interest in the studies of Albrecht Dürer and the monochrome as material signs, and, more importantly, to his wonderful understanding of the potentials of his chosen medium. The paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, and sculptures of this century are all intensely interesting, but in short, they are all unexceptional. They are better than the avant-garde work they address.