Schwarz
View current page
...more recent posts
It was at Nagy's storefront gallery that Bleckner held his pivotal 1984 show, in which he displayed just one large painting, which combined text and abstraction. "There was a whole discourse about the process of making art the Halley and Ashley Bickerton and Sherrie Levine had reopened," remembers dealer Pat Hearn. "For Ross to use that painting was really clever." When Sonnabend Gallery brought together four East Village artist-Halley, Vaisman, Jeff Koons, and Bickerton-for its infamous 1986 "Neo-Geo" show, Bleckner's coterie was suddenly on top, and Bleckner, whose work was always more sensual than intellectual, more incidental than theoretical, ended up riding on the coattails of Neo-Geo, an aridly ideological movement rooted in half-understood ideas of structuralism.
JK: Neo-geo felt like every five years the art world wants a new art world, a new emergence, new artists. Was there really a neo-geo? I don't think so.
CS: I didn't think of it as appropriation, that idea hadn't crystallized at the time. All those ideas that came down, and continue to come down--I never really gave a thought to them until I read them. In the later '80s, when it seemed like everywhere you looked people were talking about appropriation--then it seemed like a thing, a real presence. But I wasn't really aware of any group feeling. It was a pretty competitive time. It wasn't just photographers or appropriation artists versus painters; there were so many different factions--the Mary Boone artists versus the Metro Pictures, the neo-geo...
my dad used to occasionally say "Dirty Rackafratz!" instead of cussing in front of us kids. there were only two google hits with "Dirty" included in the search and two pages for "Rackafratz" alone. no real leads on the origin. i have no idea where he got that from. he was a big Walt Kelly fan so it might of come from Pogo. I first came accross variations on &*?#@ in comics, probably Mad. could have started in krazy kat or prior.
affordable housing reader
RP: The "Joke" paintings are abstract. Especially in Europe, if you can't speak English.
S: That great White Columns show. It happened with the devotion and commitment of Eugene Schwartz, as curator, and the churning openness of Bill Arning, the director. Together we produced a show of high intensity and polemics that jolted and bounced in all directions. Fortunately the appropriationists were hanging out at the time, which gave me a whole new space for potent dialogue. This was very crucial, as it allowed entry into the work by negative definition--a valid, powerful position. Then again, the appropriationists made me a precursor, although refusing to be jammed into that category immediately put me back in hot water. The dynamic difference was that Sherrie Levine, leading the pack, brilliantly used the copy as a political strategy, whereas the force of my work lies in the premise that thought is power. What is currently compelling is our pervasive cybernetic mode, which plunks copyright into mythology, makes origins a romantic notion, and pushes creativity outside the self. Remake, reuse, reassem ble, recombine-that's the way to go.
JA: The big difference is that we had worn down one of the great experiences of that century, which was modernism. Maybe the label "postmodern" is overrated and doesn't mean much anymore, but nevertheless modernism was available to be consumed. You could extract its side effects and replay them however you wanted. In the '80s you would do that consciously. You were dealing with the fact that things had been made before. The '60s in a festive way-and the '70s in a more moralistic way--were a time when everyone was trying to make signature pieces, perfect inventions. That was gone in the '80s. You were just doing your thing and using what was available, but you were still quoting the sources. The difference today, when suddenly the '80s seem so "period," is that although younger people are still lifting and recycling, they just don't care about the sources. They don't even know about the sources. So they have another kind of freedom. But suddenly, for the those who try and twist it-and that's few of them, I wou ld say--the '80s are as distant as the '60s and '70s.
flatpack house
no time
As far as someone "appropriating" Mondrian, that is, I think, impossible.
And this impossibility is quite interesting. Mondrian, from around 1920 on,
is no longer an "author." Thus there is nothing to appropriate. He was
involved in a school called "the style," the object of which was, ideally at
least, to produce a totally anonymous art. He encouraged this, and became
upset when certain members of "de styl" deviated from his way of doing
things. There are, in fact, already a great many "Mondrians" painted by
others. Once, when given some advice in speeding up his extremely
painstaking methods, so he could be more productive, he answered: "I do not
need more paintings. I need to understand." I think Mondrian would be
extremely pleased that yet another artist would be interested in using his
approach. And, as a friend of Duchamp (there was mutual admiration here),
he would probably have understood her "need" to exactly duplicate one of his
paintings (if this in fact is what she has done). In any case, in my view,
Mondrian's work is undeconstructible, or, let us say, at least as
undeconstructable as that of Derrida.
correcting and adding to the record on : STEVEN PARRINO
Steve always had a neat studio. There was never a big storage closet full of older works. Although we were friends I never really caught him at work putting together those big scale piss elegant abstractions. I do know studio mates of his however who did spend time with him working who mentioned that he had a habit of either destroying, reusing (refucking-up) or painting over unsold pieces. Some of those canvas wads were old (often exceedingly successful ) stretcher pieces. Pieces in one show would be repainted, usually trending to black for the next show. I think he took a que and ran with it, as this is something (best friend and biker buddy) Olivier Mosset does too: repainting old pieces for new shows. This would suggest that there is precious little work(for someone with 37 solo shows) outside of the sold pieces. I'm hearing that Steve didn't keep much of a record of this process. That may make for something of a challenge in assembling his catalog raisonn'e. With any luck written and photographic gallery and museum records of works destroyed, transmuted and physically same (painted-repainted) paintings with different names, identities and meanings will form a convolutedly accurate history. I would hope that this important aspect is explored in Parrino's upcoming major survey show currently being planned by Geneva's Musee d'Art Moderne et Contemporain for October 2005.
note: Parrino's destruction of unsold paintings has a wholly different meaning from the destructive editing activities of precedential modernist's like de Kooning and Baldassari. This may have been fully obvious but is just dawning on me now, posthumously.
-Bill Schwarz
"Never really intended for construction, Living Pod was a humorous dig at the established way of doing things, suggesting that houses didn't have to be symmetrical, brick-built boxes. In its obvious debt to spacecraft aesthetics, it also seems to celebrate the possibilities of new technologies and new materials--an adaptable, functional, clip-together kind of future."
"Archaeologists uncover Mies van der Rohe villa
Archaeology is getting more modern—or rather, its uses are. The foundations of a villa built 1925-27 by the eminent Bauhaus architect, Mies van der Rohe, have been uncovered in the Polish town of Gubin. It was the first Modern building by the architect, commissioned by industrialist Ernst Wolf and destroyed in World War II. The excavation project was carried out by an international team of 12 students from the Technische Universität at Cottbus. The villa may now be partially rebuilt or used to inspire artistic interventions"