TOP TEN Kat Parker

Kat Parker was born in Singapore in 1979 and is one half of the gallery duchess. Kat has kept her list simple and straight forward, so let's hop to it:

2006


1. Eva Hesse at the Jewish Museum

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2. Criterion Collection Release of Spirit of the Beehive

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3. Girl Talk - Night Ripper

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4. Artist Patrick Holderfield

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5. Artist Alexander Stewart

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6. Eddie Martinez at Ziehersmith

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7. The Proposition

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8. Robert Rauschenberg: Combines at the Met

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9. Dead Moon - Echoes of the Past

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10. Artist Jennifer Muskopf

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IN PRINT

Pick up the new issue of TimeOut Chicago for another strong Art and Design section.


I have two reviews this week. There’s Terrence Hannum’s excellent video installation made out of noise, bass, droning, distortion and ROCK at the MCA.
> THE REVIEW
> VISIT THE SHOW

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Then there’s No Coast, No Sea, work by Carl Baratta and Iva Gueorguieva in the form of straight up wild painting and drawing.
>THE REVIEW
> VISIT THE SHOW

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Finally, Ruth Lopez has a feature on the Ambroise Vollard show at the Art Institute that is very worth reading.
> THE REVIEW
>VISIT THE SHOW

Patron of the Avant-Garde

Pierre Bonnard • Ambroise Vollard • c. 1904-5 • oil on canvas • 74 x 92.5 cm. • Kunsthaus, Zurich, Switzerland

I’ve been through the show Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde (which opens o the public tomorrow) and it is amazing, a must see. It is a great collection of masterworks such as Paul Gauguin’s Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? Are We There Yet? Are We There Yet? Are We There Yet? [sic] from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Also there is the Art Institute’s Old Guitarist by Pablo Picasso. There are countless major works, A Modern Olympia, along with Paul Cézanne’s other motifs of bathers, apples, and mountain views. Gauguin’s Breton and Tahiti periods, Picasso’s birth of cubism, Aritside Maillol’s voluptuous nudes, the Nabis, the Fauves and more. It is really a rare opportunity to see all this in one place.

The premise is also very intriguing. Looking beyond the myths of the artists, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, Renoir, Picasso and on and on, this show examines not only the art dealer who gave a lot of them their first shows, but the stories of the works themselves. A painting has a life after it leaves the artist’s studio, and this show examines that. Works change hands, move around the world and often have colorful stories explaining how they end up where they do.

With masters like these, we have cultural amnesia. We take for granted that these pictures are masterpieces and that they all belong in museums. When in reality, they started out hated and unpopular. In hindsight, we read the story backwards, beginning with the knowledge that these are all great artists; their stories myths that we know will have happy endings. But Vollard and visionaries like him were essential to getting these artists’ work out to the public. Art is not a solitary endeavor, it takes a structure. Artists, collectors, dealers, institutions all play a part in bringing work to the viewer. Ambroise Vollard is one of the dealers that provided a forum for artists to communicate. Vollard was not just someone peddling paintings, he maintained a dialogue with his artists, introduced them to one another, supported them, and encouraged them to try new things. Vollard often took risks, at significant financial losses, especially in terms of his prodigious output of publications, including prints and books. This is what makes the exhibition so interesting. It tells more of the story of Modern Art than just famous painters hanging out together; it establishes the roles so many different characters played in each other’s lives.

Rudolf Stingel at the MCA

Check out our expansive photoset of the Rudolf Stingel exhibition that recently opened at the MCA. We have been lucky lately. First Richard Tuttle and now this show. Two of the best shows within memory at the MCA, or in general.

> Flickr Photoset

> Flickr Slideshow

What A Concept!

You should definitely pick up the new TimeOut Chicago it is a conceptual art free for all! First I want to plug my write up of Approach the show of JB Daniel’s “VINYL” non art ambient blank painting Minimalist stand-ins teamed with Industry of the Ordinary by curatorial team Research and Development at Ai Gallery. But there is also a feature by Terry R. Myers on the HOT Rudolf Stingel show that just opened at the MCA and a review of Fred Sandback at Rhona Hoffman by Lauren Weinberg. And finally a blurb on Robert Heinecken, whose up now the Smart and MOCP.

>R&D IOTO JB Daniel

>Rudolf Stingel

>Fred Sandback

Hey Jules

“If I could just get a spray of color in the air, and somehow it could stay there–
that would be it.”

-Jules Olitski

Jules Olitski • Instant Loveland • 1968 • acrylic on canvas • 2946 x 6457 mm • The Tate Collection

On Sunday, February 4th, 2007, American artist Jules Olitski died of cancer at the age of 84. (via Artforum.com via Der Standard) Olitski was part of the later wave of post war abstractionists championed by Clement Greenberg under the banner of “Post Painterly Abstraction” which a cooler name assigned by a critic there never has been. Other Post Painterly Abstractionists include Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland and maybe even a little bit of early Larry Poons.

In Emile de Antonio’s landmark Painter’s Painting, Olitski talks about his motivations for making a life of art:

“I decided to be a painter when my grandmother died. And there was something about that that made a number of things clear to me. I was a kid... and I loved her very much and feel that in some way she was one of the few people who supported me. That is she loved me. I got, nonetheless, the sense of an absolutely wasted, thrown away life. Like a dead cat on a garbage pail heap. And it made me get a very clear look on a all the people around me... My family, their friends... And the one thing that got through to me was the notion of... If there’s one thing you want to do, that’s meaningful, in my case it was painting, do it. Do it.”

Jules Olitski • Night and Light • JacobsonHoward Gallery

Matthew Collings in his book It Hurts delves further into Olitski’s youth. Olitski told Collings the following story in 1997 when he was visiting the artist at his home on Bear Island in New Hampshire. Collings was asking him what it was like when the critical framework that Clement Greenberg had structured around him suddenly went away because no one believed in it anymore, and then the fell into obscurity. Olitski replied that he never really went away. And it didn’t matter because he was emotionally prepared for just about anything after his early life:

“Interestingly, Olitski isn’t his real name. It’s something else, beginning with D. His father was executed in Russia in a pogrom, and his mother brought him out to New York as a child. She answered an ad to be married and the husband turned out to be a nightmare stepfather who abused him mentally and physically. He was told that he was an idiot and retarded and he believed he was. he never spoke. The only that kept him going was the fantasy of killing the stepfather when he was older. He grew up and joined the army, to get power for the murder. But when he thought he had enough power, he couldn’t go through with it, and felt pity for the stepfather instead; and he even took his name, even though he hated it.

He came out of the Army and started being an artist. But he was too socially inept to get into the art world. he lived in a little room that had rats. He was starving. He thought he was going mad. He was suicidal. Then his luck changed. Because of something to do with the G.I. Bill he was able to get a job at an art school as a teacher. He found he could talk. He had a salary. No one thought he was retarded. He kept expecting them to notice but they never did. After a while, he even got in to the art world. ... Because of his shyness he pretended his paintings were by somebody else. He said he was only the agent. It was a complicated story but in the end he got a show and after a while he stopped pretending to not be the author of his own work, and he met Greenberg, and that was the beginning of the rise.”

1922 ~ 2007

Art Institute of Chicago to Indianapolis Museum of Art: SUCK IT!

Sports are a very nice break from art, you can root for your team and go crazy and not worry about all the bullshit of the artworld. You can be a regular person and like something fun and normal. Especially if you are a Bears fan, because they are gonna ride those teenage ponies into the ground!

Asinine.

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Erik Wenzel

Director,
Art or Idiocy?

Member,
The Evil International Art Cabal

Art Criticism, Mass Transit Criticism

Be sure to pick up a copy of this week's TimeOut. In addition to its usual great features, you will find another review I have done for them. This time it is on the current show at rowlandcontemporary, The Nature of Disturbance curated by Dan Devening. Also be sure to go and see the show before it closes on February 10. You can always read it online (here), but it doesn't have the same effect of being in print. It's also worth checking out this week for the feature on the CTA and it's lack of good trains and buses and, well, everything. You know you are in trouble when the Tribune, the Sun-Times, Crain's, TimeOut and so on, are all saying you need to shape up your operation.

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Also, I just did an interview with Centerstage Chicago. You can learn all about art, writing about it, the best view in town, and like um wow, words that I never realize I am saying when I am like stalling for time while thinking of like um something to say. >HERE