Representation and it's relation to the real looking at Claude Monet's work,Vincent van Gogh's paintings of almond tree flowers, Joan Mitchell's work and Eric Baudelaire's The Dreadful Details

Result #1

Representation and it's relation to the real looking at Claude Monet's work,Vincent van Gogh's paintings of almond tree flowers, Joan Mitchell's work and Eric Baudelaire's The Dreadful Details of My Life, all of which have been recuperated in a volume of art-historical epigrams, be it the collection of Van Goghs Van Goghs, Claes Oldenburgs, or Jeffrey DeNays. (Its a shame that Oldenburg has been replaced by, and not shown alongside, Van Gogh, who is not as well known as he ought to be.)Of course, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Berlin Staatliche Kunstakademie in East Germany, the role of the East German art establishment has become all the more prominent. In the meantime, the East German art scene has suffered through the loss of many of its institutions, as if it could not compete with the West. The art scene has been weakened and weakened, for the most part, by having to deal with a nonentity, a nonentity that, by definition, has never existed. Thus the West has become the source of inspiration for an East German art that can hardly compete with East German art. And the East German art world, which was once the playground of the revolutionary intelligentsia, has had to give up the idea of the artist as a European or international revolutionary. For this reason, the East German art world has been a rather strange and dispiriting place. In the absence of any decisive and decisive step in the direction of political and artistic life, one can only hope that the art scene will grow more numerous and more interesting, more adventurous, more open to the possibility of new possibilities in art. It is, however, too early to say. Yet it is no small achievement to see that a major East German art scene has been established in a relatively short time.In the meantime, the East German art scene has suffered through the loss of many of its institutions, as if it could not compete with East German art.

Result #2

Representation and it's relation to the real looking at Claude Monet's work,Vincent van Gogh's paintings of almond tree flowers, Joan Mitchell's work and Eric Baudelaire's The Dreadful Details of Painting, or David Salle's works with the smallest pigment. There are so many that the cumulative effect of the exhibition's overview is not entirely convincing, especially in the cases of art which, for me, can be seen as a kind of residual masterpiece—works that deserve to be presented as historical or cultural memento mori. And I dont mean to suggest that this is necessarily the case with Jeffrey Deitch, for example, whose work is more clearly contingent on the juxtaposition of two paintings. But even then, there are a few works that stand out among the rest. Jeffrey Deitch's new paintings have no doubt acquired a certain notoriety because they are also the subject of a new book, which is to say, not only the work of a living artist but of a living painter. And Jeffrey Deitch's new work is certainly still the work of a living painter, but it no longer is; in fact, it now is. Jeffrey Deitch's paintings are as much about the imperfections of modernist painting as they are about the imperfections of the work itself, which is to say, about what the work is today. There are no historical points of reference, but there is certainly a set of questions which can be raised about the ongoing condition of painting as a medium—whether it is even possible to speak about this condition without referring to the work of a painter like Jeffrey Deitch, whose work comes to us as a kind of labor-of-love. But to say that Jeffrey Deitch's paintings are about painting is to say nothing of the sort; they are about the imperfections of modernist painting. Jeffrey Deitch is a painter who, in the words of Michael Fried, has struggled for something that is hard to describe but impossible to define. His works are about the imperfections of painting. Jeffrey Deitch's paintings are about the imperfections of modernism.

Result #3

Representation and it's relation to the real looking at Claude Monet's work,Vincent van Gogh's paintings of almond tree flowers, Joan Mitchell's work and Eric Baudelaire's The Dreadful Details of the Artist, which are far less real than the works in the show. Her paintings, like those of Monet, are signs of their time and place, and they have their place. They are both the work of an artist and the work of another, and they are both ways of thinking about painting. It's that's not so strange, in fact, considering that in the late 80s, we were facing an explosion of abstraction and its rejection of the concrete—and, more to the point, its deconstruction of itself, as Walter Benjamin wrote in the Modernist essay The Open Mind: For once, it is not the part of a thing to which an artists attention is devoted, but the part of the art to which it is devoted. But it seems that the real question of the artistic and the artistic artist is not what art is, but what art is not.The exhibition contained three works from the series The Beautiful Number, 2002–2004, which, though beautiful, are simplistic. The first, from 2002, is a small, four-panel piece consisting of two rectangular panels: one panel on top of the other, one on top of it, and a couple of blank panels. The rest of the panels are black. Their placement makes them look like paint sprayed down the wall. The works are about the same size, and the artist has used the same number of panels in each piece—nearly the same. It's not a matter of miniatures, but of abstractions that are not abstract. Their presence is almost a testimony to the fact that painting is about the struggle to get inside the work and to get out. This is the same struggle that was expressed in sculpture.The second work, From the Drawing, 2004, consists of four rectangles: one red, one yellow, and one white. The red and white elements are actually painted on the sides of the panels.

Result #4

Representation and it's relation to the real looking at Claude Monet's work,Vincent van Gogh's paintings of almond tree flowers, Joan Mitchell's work and Eric Baudelaire's The Dreadful Details, but here the work and the wall itself seemed to be each other's family.This is not to suggest that they havent been represented. They have. Here was an exhibition of works by artists who arent generally thought of as representative of the period represented. So it was interesting that, for example, a work by Frank Stella, Untitled (from the series Hot Spot, 1948–49), was included, but only in a reproduction, and no other photographs were included, either. (Stella died before the exhibition, so this work might not be immediately available for viewing.) Also, one of the most celebrated of the lot, John Baldessaris Don Judd's On the Other Hand, 1952, was here placed next to a photograph of a room, half painted white, half painted black. The difference between the two rooms was not, to my mind, decisive, but it was clear from the photograph that the room was the one in which Judd had left his work. (The photograph wasnt the only one with this title.)In other works, the question was whether the works were representative or not. For example, one could argue that T. J. Clark's photographs of his studio and studio set, including a dozen or so in the show, are representative, but they arent representative of that period, and if you can get the image of a studio in a day-care center to fill in the blanks, youll find that the pictures are not representative of that period. Or the works by Donald Judd, all Untitled (from the series Blender, 1964–67), and one, Untitled (from the series (B) and (C), both from 1967, are representative, but they dont look like they were made by Judd. They look like they were made by other artists. And so on.

Result #5

Representation and it's relation to the real looking at Claude Monet's work,Vincent van Gogh's paintings of almond tree flowers, Joan Mitchell's work and Eric Baudelaire's The Dreadful Details of Beauty, the portrait of Jean Cocteau's lover, in a white room, and so on. But in fact, these paintings are and have been. Almost from the start, the first paintings of the Surrealist work of the thirties and forties were to be found in Paris in the Guggenheims permanent collection, where they were promptly absorbed by a new generation of painters, who were deeply moved by the quasi-Surrealist philosophy of Bauhaus art. But they had very little to do with anything Surrealism, or even with any kind of later Surrealism. The fact that these works were presented in the mid-60s in a commercial gallery, they had nothing to do with the museum. The point was that the curators, in choosing works by the leading Surrealist painters, were to have the last word on Surrealism, and on this, they succeeded in going on.This is what I take as the curators mistake. They chose works that, in the context of the exhibition, were already known to the public, and, in the process, had become the stuff of legend. What was really interesting was to see how they looked, and how they looked in the middle of the twentieth century. But it was not enough to just see them. There was to be an exchange between the works and their subjects, a dialogue between artist and audience. It was necessary to have a dialogue, in a sort of intellectual symphony, between these two poles, the human and the animal. Surrealism is not a tradition that can be experienced as a subject of discourse; Surrealism is not an act of knowing and showing the world. And yet, in this exhibition, Surrealism is the thing that the curators look for. In a sense, they also look for the work of artists who have only just been able to get their start in the art world.