ARTINFO's review of Norton Museum's "Now WHAT?"

Exhibitionists at the Art Fair

"Two curators from the Norton Museum of Art in Palm Beach, Charles Stainback and Cheryl Brutvan, spent 45 hours over five days cruising 13 of this month's art fairs in Miami during Art Basel Miami Beach, viewing thousands of artworks in the hope of finding a common thread and then showing the best of the bunch. 

"The hard part of the assignment was not the looking," says Stainback, the William and Sarah Ross Soter curator of photography at the Norton. "The hard part was trying to select a cohesive body of work that said more than 'these are our favorites.' That was never our intention." 

Allyson Strafella's "Inverted Red Catenary," 2010

Within a short time, Stainback and Brutvan determined that information sharing, communication, and messaging were much on the minds of artists today, and the show they organized at the Norton, titled "Now What?" and running through March 13, includes several works that use actual materials — books, newspapers, receipts, and so on — as both medium and message. In all, there are 39 drawings, photographs, and sculptures by 21 artists, many of them previously unknown to the curators (and quite a few new to this writer as well). 

Some were modest but painstakingly crafted efforts. Allyson Strafella's drawings are made with a typewriter, repeatedly pounding on punctuation marks to arrive at a pattern of garbled language and tidy grids. Mark Dion's "Herbarium" offers re-creations of plant drawings made by an ambitious horticulturist murdered by Seminole Indians in 1840. Richard Gilpin's abstracted cityscape, "Splinter XVII," was arrived at after scoring and peeling away the surface of a photograph to produce a lively syncopated surface that calls to mind a delightfully tipsy but anorectic Mondrian. 

With works like these, a certain amount of backstory is helpful in understanding the artists' goals (this is a hurdle "typical of much contemporary art," notes Stainback, who promises that wall text will soon alleviate some puzzlement), but others beguile without revealing their stratagems. Mickalene Thomas's "You're Gonna Give Me the Love I Need" is a 12-foot-long tableau of an African-American odalisque, studded with rhinestones, reclining on a gaudy patchwork divan. It's not clear what this has to do with "information sharing" or "messaging," but the work certainly radiates heat. As does Liza Lou's elaborate "tapestry" of glass beads on aluminum panels, which appear to have been partly effaced or defaced by a creepy mold-like growth across the surface."

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ZOU CAO | EVERLASTING CLASSIC - ArtDaily Review

Von Lintel Gallery Present an Exhibition of Paintings by Chinese Artist and Philosopher Zou Cao

Zou Cao, Internationale – Andy Warhol, 2010, oil on canvas, 15 panels, 35.4 x 35.4 inches each. Photo: Courtesy of the artist and Von Lintel Gallery.

"Von Lintel Gallery present Everlasting Classic, the first United States solo exhibition of paintings by Chinese artist and philosopher Zou Cao.

Some say the rising tide of globalization threatens to drown individuality in a sea of sameness. Zou Cao resists this possibility by using his own fingerprint as a motif, asserting his unique identity, and by extension, the importance of all individuals. In past works, Cao used actual fingerprints as a drawing technique to render politically charged scenes.

For the paintings in this show, he has expanded the technique, literally, by enlarging a single print to overlap portraits of well-known figures such as Chairman Mao, Madonna, Audrey Hepburn, Andy Warhol and Michael Jackson.

The images declare that all people, famous or not, are unique and that despite our increasingly collective existence, every individual adds their singular mark to our shared history. Combining individual and group identities this way, Cao has found a patch of high ground on which we might all avoid globalization's torrent of anonymity."

Zou Cao has exhibited widely throughout the globe, including at the Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai; the Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai; the Walter Art Museum, Augsburg, Germany and the Indonesia Yudeyao Museum of Art, Jakarta, Indonesia"

ArtDaily

DAVID MAISEL | 'Place as Idea' @ Wooster Art Museum

David Maisel, Terminal Mirage #215-9-4, 2003, Chromogenic print, Gift of Edward Osowski in honor of the photographer and the Eliza S. Paine Fund, 2005.102

"Place as Idea explores the idea of place as a vehicle for visualizing time, displacement, memory, and fantasy in works by an international roster of contemporary artists.

Anchoring the show conceptually and chronologically is Rundown, a video of three 1969 projects by Robert Smithson, each of which involved the pouring of viscous substances: glue, concrete, and asphalt. Voiceover by the artist explains some of his concerns specific to these works, as well as elucidates Smithson's still-influential ideas about entropy, geologic time, and the positioning of the artwork in the land as opposed to the gallery. In her 2008 single-channel video, The Vanishing, Julia Hechtman takes us into the land to witness the digital disappearance of a lone tree in a barren landscape and leaves us to reconcile an emotionally-charged absence and ghostly afterimage. Other artists, including Yun-Fei Ji, David Maisel, Paul Noble, Elaine Spatz-Rabinowitz, and Rachel Whiteread consider ideas of place as sites of human intervention into the landscape, drawing our attention to acts of fantasy and folly, erection and erasure, ruin and reclamation. 

Uta Barth, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Abelardo Morell expand our expectations of the photograph as a record of architectural experience. Cinematic time and place are re-conceptualized by John Baldessari, Fiona Banner, and Hiroshi Sugimoto as stationary imagery or text. Martin Kippenberger's collaborative project, created in 1991 under the conceptual umbrella of the “The William Holden Company,” takes the form of a series of postcards (a universal conceptualization of place) mailed from various locations along a trek in Africa, signifying then and now connections and distances between individuals, geographies, economies, and cultures."

This exhibition has been supported by the Don and Mary Melville Contemporary Art Fund and Worcester Magazine.

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MARCO BREUER 'The Nature of the Pencil' Brooklyn Rail Review

MARCO BREUER The Nature of the Pencil

by Shane McAdams

"In Nature, Breuer strays from his standard gallery presentation by placing each work irregularly within a soot-gray band of paint, adding chalk marks that make a clear reference to a blackboard. This enveloping motif suggests an experimental relationship between the classroom and the darkroom as it relates to Breuer’s photo-based work. Most of the chalk marks are cryptic: the word "extraction," some Twombly-esque scrawls, several half-erased schematic marks around framed art works. There’s some German text that translates to something like "what's important is the white between the words." Though one can try to decode these words and glyphs, their real function seems to be symbolic, to be seen and felt rather than read. Kind of like the work we were required to show in math class to let the teacher know we weren’t using a calculator to get the answers.

Breuer's individual photographs are mysterious and seductive even if you don’t know how they came to be. Though "how" is integrally tied to "what" in his work. I won’t reveal how certain images in this show, his fifth at Von Lintel, were made, because as a viewer, guessing their nature is part of the experience. In the past, Breuer has burned, cut, shot at, and otherwise maimed photographic paper to create imagery. Unlike Alberto Burri, who embraced the brut rawness of, say, a burned piece of plastic, Breuer’s work uses violent and unorthodox actions to transform his materials into more refined visual delectations.

...

The title of the show comes from William Henry Fox Talbot's book The Pencil of Nature, which is another cue to Breuer's interest in experimentation. Talbot was one of the pioneers, if not the inventor, of photography, and his investigation into the medium reflects Breuer's own interests in the mechanics of the photographic image and the development of cameraless photography.

The experimental bent of Breuer's practice is revealed slowly and surely as one sees more of it. A single photo might be a cousin of Andreas Feininger's image of the lights of a Navy helicopter; another might be an Uta Barth, or a photo of a bacterial culture stolen from a microbiology laboratory. But as a whole, the seduction of the images gives way to the integrity of Breuer's search itself. This abiding experimental spirit is as important as the images formed from the manipulated emulsion. The experimental impulse is the common ancestor of contemporary art and science. Unfortunately, the two disciplines have diverged dramatically. As a portion of the scientific world has become more and more proficient at reverse-engineering the mechanics of human emotion, and devising formulas for manufacturing popular entertainment, art has taken on an antagonistic role in order to keep things unfamiliar (Victor Shklovsky) and new (Ezra Pound).

Thus, we get bloated, soulless entertainment with the power to transfix and opiate, and art that is often as preoccupied with its opponent as it is by its own creative obligations. The reason Marco Breuer's work can be an antidote to a saccharine animated film about dragons isn’t because it's less flawed, more transfixing, or more morally upright; it is because it’s full of flaws and indulgent curiosity. His work is built on scrapes and scars; indeed his work is the scars of experimentation that represent the will and drive to make something unique."

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ALLYSON STRAFELLA to be featured in Norton Museum's "Now WHAT?"

Two of  ALLYSON STRAFELLA's works from PULSE Miami have been chosen to be featured in Norton Museum's upcoming group exhibition "Now WHAT?":

"Now WHAT? will celebrate the world of contemporary art that will be at the Norton Museum's doorstep in December. The Norton is poised to take advantage of the energy and innovation found in the many representations of contemporary art at Art Basel Miami Beach, as well as the numerous satellite fairs which descend upon Miami Beach in early December. 

Through a selection by curators Cheryl Brutvan and Charlie Stainback, the Norton will provide a ― snapshot of this moment in contemporary artistic practice without the pretext of a biennial survey. Instead this exhibition will showcase some of the most engaging work being made today and provoke discussions about the art of our time and expanding the Norton Museum’s collection. Now WHAT? will inaugurate the contemporary galleries and adjacent photography galleries of the Norton Museum, recently designated by Norton Director and CEO, Hope Alswang.

Organized by the Norton Museum of Art.  

Local presentation of this exhibition is made possible in part through the generosity of Gilbert and Ann Maurer and the Contemporary and Modern Art Council of the Norton Museum of Art."

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PULSE Miami 2010

We also snapped Chelsea gallery Von Lintel owner Thomas von Lintel, whose gallery shows contemporary paintings and photography. He’s standing in front of a painting of Angkor Wat that’s so detailed, we thought it was a photo. 
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PULSE Contemporary Art Fair's Photos
PULSE Miami 2010

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ZOU CAO | EVERLASTING CLASSIC - Opening Reception Dec 9, 6-8 PM

 Zou Cao, Internationale Andy Warhol, 2010, Oil on canvas, 35.4 x 35.4 inches each, group of 15

Von Lintel Gallery is pleased to present Everlasting Classic, the first United States solo exhibition of paintings by Chinese artist and philosopher Zou Cao.

Some say the rising tide of globalization threatens to drown individuality in a sea of sameness. Zou Cao resists this possibility by using his own fingerprint as a motif, asserting his unique identity, and by extension, the importance of all individuals. In past works, Cao used actual fingerprints as a drawing technique to render politically charged scenes. For the paintings in this show, he has expanded the technique, literally, by enlarging a single print to overlap portraits of well-known figures such as Chairman Mao, Madonna, Audrey Hepburn, Andy Warhol and Michael Jackson. The images declare that all people, famous or not, are unique and that despite our increasingly collective existence, every individual adds their singular mark to our shared history. Combining individual and group identities this way, Cao has found a patch of high ground on which we might all avoid globalization's torrent of anonymity.

Zou Cao has exhibited widely throughout the globe, including at the Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai; the Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai; the Walter Art Museum, Augsburg, Germany and the Indonesia Yudeyao Museum of Art, Jakarta, Indonesia.