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5 matchs for parrino:
Bill Schwarz, 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall, 1986. Exhibited at Pompeii (New York City).
Quoting myself, from the comments:
As for [Brian] Sholis' essay [on Cady Noland], it's kind of the standard academic rubber stamp. He treats Noland as a solitary genius that emerged fully formed into the world. A more interesting essay would place her in the New York scene from the East Village and "Neo Geo" era, with references to artists doing similar work.Thanks to Bill Schwarz for this image, an interesting and amusing piece regardless of whether another artist from the same time period went on to make beer famous.
Sholis mentions that Noland included "work by New York artists" in her Documenta installation. He doesn't say which ones. Maybe she was a little more generous than her critical advocate(s).
I know artist Bill Schwarz, who also emerged out of the East Village scene and was in several Bob Nickas-curated shows, had a minimal style piece called 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall that predated Noland's brewskis, and the late Steven Parrino had a painting at Metro Pictures of stocks (as in the Colonial era punishment), a motif which Noland also used, in sculpture form.
The great essay still to be written (?) puts Cady Noland in context of radical or nihilist interpretations of Minimalism in the Reagan '80s, with all the connections to her peer group.
- tom moody 5-17-2006 1:25 pm
See also: Bove, Carol
Portrait of the late Steven Parrino, based on an artnet photo by Nancy Smith. Drawn in my cubicle Sunday and Tuesday.
A couple of sentences in the post on Steven Parrino have been revised to read:
One thing's sure: if Roberta Smith of the New York Times doesn't like your work, you'd be very lucky not to have her write your obit. Her tribute [to Parrino] is how shall we say...affectless? merely descriptive? The closest it comes to a value judgment is saying the work had a "relentless if oddly energetic punk nihilism," a collection of adjectives and adverbs that give off a nice crackle but probably cancel each other out.
Artist Bill Schwarz, who knew the late painter Steven Parrino well, posts some thoughts and corrections of the newsprint accounts of Parrino's life and untimely passing here. One thing's sure: if Roberta Smith of the New York Times doesn't like your work, you'd be very lucky not to have her write your obit. Her tribute is how shall we say...affectless? merely descriptive? The closest it comes to a value judgment is saying the work had a "relentless if oddly energetic punk nihilism," a collection of adjectives and adverbs that give off a nice crackle but probably cancel each other out. The New York Post obit supplied the info that Parrino was "a little bit of a loner" who "didn't like crowds or parties." The police told a friend of Parrino's they believe that his motorcycle hit a pothole on Kent Ave., just a block away from his studio. In other words, an accident that could happen to anybody, especially with New York sized potholes. Yet by saying he "lost control" of his cycle "returning from a New Year's Eve party in Williamsburg," Smith creates the clear implication that...well, what does that imply to you? A journalist can be perfectly factual and still smear through the omission of detail. Thus are "bad boy" legends born, one supposes.
Bill says: "Parrino's destruction of unsold paintings has a wholly different meaning from the destructive editing activities of precedential modernists like de Kooning and Baldessari." He doesn't elaborate, but I think what he's talking about was, Baldessari famously destroyed his early, painterly paintings before embarking on his career as a conceptualist, but it's a fair guess he hasn't destroyed much since then. Whereas Parrino constantly cannibalized unsold work to make new--it was evident right there in the rubble pile at your feet. This was a very cool thing. I had a hard time with the "signature" canvases conspicuously torn off the stretcher, wadded up, and rehung--they seemed angry about something not worth getting angry about, which is to say, painting on canvas. (I'm open to having my mind changed by a retrospective.) He did do some beautiful paintings in that style, though (see above) and his career commitment to The Dark Side in his video, music and zine-making was likewise exquisite. I remember he organized some event nights at Team that included a screening of Dario Argento's Suspiria and also introduced Shell to the art world. Also very cool.
He will be missed, New York Times notwithstanding.
Mark Dagley is one of my favorite painters but kind of a hard sell unless both humor and minimalism are your thing. He emerged in New York at the same time as Steve Di Benedetto, Steven Parrino, and Michael Scott, all of whom were doing post-Peter Halley masking tape paintings in the '80s. After a solo at Tony Shafrazi in '87 he showed quite a bit in Europe, and his work appears sporadically in the states. Of his peer group, I think he's the best, if not the best known. He has a genuinely quirky approach to Mondrian-ish "universal absolutes"--primary colors and basic structures that he keeps running catchy variations on. We worked together on a couple of exhibits, including "Op at UP" and "post-hypnotic," and he currently has a tight, exquisite little show up at Abaton Garage in Jersey City. The piece depicted above, Untitled Construction 5-30-04, consists of cylinders of Play-dohTM he allowed to dry in the tub and coated with acrylic resin. These "found color" objects are lined up inside a white-painted wood enclosure that hangs on the wall. Simple, elegant, stupid--what's not to like?