Jeffrey Weiss

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  print October 2013

  CLOSE UP: THE ABSENT OBJECT

  IN “WHY SCULPTURE IS BORING” (1846), Charles Baudelaire seeks to diagnose the modern condition of the sculptural object. His chief claim, however, concerns the elementary nature of the object across historical time. In contrast to painting, Baudelaire writes, sculpture in the round is plagued by certain crucial “disadvantages.” A painting is “despotic”: In its flat frontality, it demands to be seen from one position alone. Conversely, a work of sculpture, which we are apt to view from many perspectives, cannot control the way in which it is beheld. Despite its identity as an autonomous object

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  print March 2013

  THINGS NOT NECESSARILY MEANT TO BE VIEWED AS ART

  WHAT DOES IT MEAN to speak of the “status of the object” in art? The phrase has generally been deployed in discussions around the unfixed material identity of the aesthetic object in the postmodern era. When used this way, it is meant to signal, among other things, the end of medium specificity, which has given way in artistic practice to a mobile, variable, or indeterminate relation between the terms of a work and its material means. At stake is the work’s very constitution: It is no longer understood necessarily to take only one form—indeed, it may not require concrete form of any kind.

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  print September 2012

  Dan Flavin’s “‘. . . in daylight or cool white.’”

  A SOLITARY LAMP mounted on an aging, flaking studio wall: Shown this way, in an unprepossessing photograph, the diagonal of May 25, 1963 is both lowly and beatific. Accordingly, for the layout of Dan Flavin’s “ ‘. . . in daylight or cool white.’ an autobiographical sketch,” which appeared in these pages in December 1965, the radiant image was reproduced in black-and-white on matte amber stock. For all its candor, the diagonal is weird and complex: a gas-filled electrical readymade that traffics with pictorial and sculptural varieties of modernist abstraction. Flavin tells us that the diagonal

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  previews January 2012

  “Matisse: Paires/Impaires”

  Forget the rivalry between Picasso and Matisse: Matisse was, it appears, his own severest competitor.

  Forget the rivalry between Picasso and Matisse: Matisse was, it appears, his own severest competitor. Coming on the heels of “Matisse: Radical Invention 1913–1917,” an exhibition concerning the artist’s tortured practice of scraping and revising his painted work, “Matisse: Paires/Impaires” showcases paired pieces devoted to a single motif. Indeed, Matisse’s process, once portrayed as largely intuitive, is now routinely said to have been formal and strict. Perhaps this approach counts as a necessary historical correction. In any

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  print November 2011

  Jeffrey Weiss

  I WORKED BRIEFLY BUT CLOSELY with Cy Twombly in 2001, during the installation of his exhibition of sculpture at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. The show (originally organized by Katharina Schmidt and Paul Winkler for the Kunstmuseum Basel and the Menil Collection, Houston) was a leap for the NGA, a largely conservative institution. Initially intended for the East Building, it was ultimately installed in the Mellon galleries of the old West Building, a series of elegant Beaux-Arts rooms that were whitewashed for the occasion. Skylights that are normally covered or strongly filtered

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  print September 2011

  Richard Serra

  IT IS DIFFICULT to imagine drawing without sculpture in the work of Richard Serra. We inevitably invoke them together, even when drawing is the topic at hand. Drawing is always understood to be secondary, yet Serra himself has long said that his sculpture deploys—even that it is—drawing, by which he means that it represents the functional application of drawing as an operation. Specifically, it is his idea of drawing as “cut” that has, since the 1970s, determined two basic properties of his sculpture: the physical partition of material elements and the way the work itself is made to

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  print February 2011

  Carl Andre

  WE NEVER STOP RELEARNING the significance of certain bodies of work. A remarkable installation on view at the Chinati Foundation demonstrates—or, better, reminds us—how Carl Andre can collapse the distance between almost-nothing and almost-everything.

  Installation is intrinsic to the subliminal power of Andre’s sculpture—to the way we not only examine the work but physically engage it—and “Cuts into Space: Sculptures by Carl Andre” (organized by Marianne Stockebrand, until recently the director of Chinati) has been installed with perfect tact. Five works occupy the venue (a

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  previews January 2011

  Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective

  Richard Serra has described his sculptural practice as being grounded in drawing: Drawing as “cut” represents the division of a sheet by a line—and, in turn, of actual space by the edge of a steel plate.

  Richard Serra has described his sculptural practice as being grounded in drawing: Drawing as “cut” represents the division of a sheet by a line—and, in turn, of actual space by the edge of a steel plate. He has also approached drawing as a relentless, heavy application of medium—generally black paint stick—to support. And the huge “installation drawings,” which occupy whole walls, seize control of one’s sensation of the space of a room. Organized by the Menil Collection, Houston, this first full-scale retrospective of Serra’s

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  previews January 2011

  Al Taylor: Wire Instruments and Pet Stains

  At last, a museum survey for Al Taylor, who has been largely—and criminally— overlooked in the United States

  At last, a museum survey for Al Taylor, who has been largely—and criminally— overlooked in the United States. Though restricted to only two series (“Wire Instruments,” 1989–90, and “Pet Stains,” 1989–92), the exhibition will bring us some fifty works, including not only drawings but a number of objects the artist made from scavenged materials,constructions that were both inspired by and the subject of many works on paper. Taylor thought of his entire practice as a form of drawing—and of drawing, in turn, as a method for seeing. In these

• print December 2010

  Al Taylor

  It is hard to know where to begin describing Al Taylor’s imagination. His practice was a somewhat hermetic, hybrid one, a private marriage of drawing and object making. Taylor (who moved to New York from Kansas City, Missouri, in 1970 and died of cancer in 1999 at the age of fifty-one) spent seven years working for Robert Rauschenberg, so his scavenger’s devotion to cast-off objects comes with a pedigree. But to say that Rauschenberg’s example somehow accounts for Taylor is about as useful as saying that Frank O’Hara read a lot of Arthur Rimbaud. Marcel Duchamp was clearly important to him,

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  previews September 2010

  Kees van Dongen

  Art historians typically associate Kees van Dongen with French Fauve painting. His works from that period—images of circus acrobats and music-hall performers—are striking for their reductive and caricatural approach to modernist figuration.

  Art historians typically associate Kees van Dongen with French Fauve painting. His works from that period—images of circus acrobats and music-hall performers—are striking for their reductive and caricatural approach to modernist figuration. Yet like those of other Fauves (e.g., Braque, Derain, Matisse), van Dongen’s career extends far beyond that era. In recent times, he has been neglected, taken as a minor figure, a fatuous court painter of bohemian high society. But perhaps the contemporary reemergence of painterly figuration (Marlene Dumas, Elizabeth Peyton) allows us

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  print March 2010

  STATE OF THE ART: MATISSE UNDER EXAMINATION

  With the Art Institute of Chicago’s exhibition “Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913–1917” poised to open later this month, art historian JEFFREY WEISS reflects on this pivotal period in the artist’s career—assessing not only the show’s remarkable discoveries about Matisse’s working process but also the advanced technologies and the curatorial approach that made such insights possible.

  IN HIS 1957 ESSAY “NEW YORK PAINTING ONLY YESTERDAY,” the critic Clement Greenberg observed that, during the 1930s, Henri Matisse’s painting Bathers by a River, 1909–17, was on view for some time in the lobby of the Valentine Gallery on East Fifty-seventh Street.¹ He claims he saw it there so often he could have “cop[ied] it by heart.” The implication is that it was an object of close study for many painters as well. What Greenberg ascribes to Bathers (and to Matisse’s work in general) is an anticipation of the “Abstract-Expressionist notion of the big picture,” with specific reference to the