Three reviews of The Forever Now at MoMA. From reading them the show seems provincial and the reviews incapable of seeing any big picture other than occasionally mentioning other artists who seem just the same as the ones who are in the show, and lamenting them not being in it too. Also a basic premise of all three that the artists are at home with painting from the past seems a bit untenable, or significantly limited; its more that they seem at home with superficial impressions of art of the last 50 years. THE FOREVER NOW REVIEW: CALLING TIME ON THE AVANT GARDE Jason Farago Friday 12 December 2014 The Forever Now, Moma’s long-anticipated new exhibition of contemporary painting, is a show worth seeing – which is not the same as saying it’s good. It takes (largely) abstract painting, the medium most beloved of the oligarchical art collectors of our time, and turns a blind eye to its market status. It makes grand, not entirely convincing claims about painting’s potential, then illustrates them with art that feels safe or unambitious. It takes familiar names from the last decade of painting and picks winners and losers, though without really establishing the rules of the game. It waves big, expensive flags in front of the angry bulls of the art world, and waits to be gored. Still, whatever anyone says about the paintings in The Forever Now – the New York Museum of Modern Art (Moma)’s first contemporary painting survey in an astonishing 30 years, and open to the public on Sunday – it is definitely worth fighting about. You might leave depressed, but at least you’ll have something to say. Laura Owens’s Untitled (2013). Laura Hoptman, the veteran curator who organized it, has undertaken the artistic equivalent of a suicide mission. When new possibilities for painting appear stalled, and when trashy pump-and-dump collectors fawn over so-called zombie abstraction (safe, reductive pictures that look good in an art fair booth), she has gone all in. Rather than present a full survey of contemporary painting, she’s elected a small group – 17 artists, mostly Americans – who, she claims, reflect a new “atemporal” practice of painting. For the first time, Hoptman claims in her audacious catalogue essay, culture no longer “define[s] the time in which we live”, but rather reflects “a new and strange state of the world in which, courtesy of the internet, all eras seem to exist at once.” No more avant garde, she says. No more linear history. For that matter, no more Moma: after the stately progression from one movement to another in the museum’s 20th century galleries, nothing in particular will follow. Contemporary painting, instead, looks in Hoptman’s vision a little like an Amy Winehouse record: not really new, not really retro, just afloat between past and present, or else wrenched out of time completely. The Forever Now: no more avant garde. So Nicole Eisenman, who’s the closest this show has to a figurative painter, mashes together west African masks, German expressionist brushwork, and early American regionalist motifs in large paintings of disembodied heads. Laura Owens, whose work looks better than ever, mimics digital editing software or computer drawing tools, then combines those with Matisse-like decorative passages and silkscreened texts. And even the junkier, lazier abstract painters here, such as the thought-murdering 28-year-old Oscar Murillo, strive not for novelty but overlapping, uncertain reconstitutions of atemporal styles and gestures. The elder stateswoman of The Forever Now is Amy Sillman, 59, whose jaunty, at times humorous abstract paintings arise from layer after layer of forceful mark-making, sometimes in an abstract expressionist vein. (And, as a sidebar: the women in The Forever Now pummel the men. Not one of the eight male artists here comes anywhere close to the intricacy or complexity of Sillman, Owens, Eisenman, and others. It’s almost embarrassing.) Sillman, like all the best painters here, privileges imprecise, off-kilter compositions, but not in imitation of any one style. They are pick-and-mix paintings, taking a little from this tradition and a little from that one, a little self-expression here, a little meaningless gesture there, with no particular place to go. Amy Sillman’s Still Life 2 (2014). Hoptman isn’t saying that these paintings are anachronistic, or derivative, or parodies. Those words imply a conscious effort to showcase some earlier style or element, and then to call it into question. “Atemporal”, by contrast, means reckoning with these paintings as paintings, rather than as commentary or critique. The artists here aren’t nostalgic. They know their history but don’t feel imprisoned by it. They know it so well, in fact, that they don’t even bother to strive for novelty, which looks more and more like a fraud or a nonstarter. Kerstin Brätsch, the best of the younger artists in this show, has said that any abstract gesture she could make would be “not empty anymore but loaded with historical reference”. Instead she uses well-known techniques, from wavy colored lines to Richteresque blurs, with no built-in significance and for whatever purposes she needs: a painting, a poster, a clothing design. Kerstin Brätsch’s Blocked Radiant D (for Ioana) (2011). Hoptman, rather recklessly, claims that this atemporality is a “wholly unique phenomenon in western culture”. Yet for most of European art history, art expressed to viewers nothing about its time at all. Art was, by and large, a religious enterprise, and therefore – as the art historian Hans Belting has shown – occupied a divine, atemporal realm removed from human cycles of life and history. Painters of the Renaissance thought of their art as approaching eternal greatness, not speaking for their age. Artworks were often repainted, or sometimes substituted wholesale centuries later. Time didn’t march forward, but folded in on itself. Maybe we are now back in such a condition, with Winehouse’s Rehab playing on repeat while we scribble the same old scribbles. Kerstin Brätsch’s paintings, which are displayed propped against the wall rather than hung. From other angles, though, forever-now painting looks like a front. In a religious age atemporal art might have removed itself from history to reach the divine. In a secular one, “atemporal” can feel like a synonym for “dead”. You can wonder about that with a whole lot of painting in this show, starting with those of Rashid Johnson, an otherwise talented artist showing some of the worst works of his career: large blocks of black soap and wax, aimlessly and exhaustingly scored with squiggles. The self-important paintings of Joe Bradley, consisting of little more than a stick figure or a Superman S symbol on untreated canvas, can be aggrandized as much as you want with psychological jaw-jaw, but they don’t come close to earning wall space here. And what on earth is Julie Mehretu doing in this show? The Ethiopian-born American is one of the best painters of her generation, yet her timely art is obsessed with contemporary capital flows and geographic disorientation. They’re not forever-now, but grandly historical and resolutely present-tense. I was delighted to see her new work here, but their inclusion makes you wonder how seriously this show takes its own positions. Julie Mehretu’s Heavier Than Air (Written Form) (2014). One wants to give Hoptman the benefit of the doubt, but it begins to look as if the forever-now framework – which, with different names like “postproduction” or “heterochronia,” has been doing the rounds of the art world since at least the late 1990s – lies somewhere between an insight and a ruse. It certainly does plug in rather perfectly to the insane contemporary art market, which now has a fancy buzzword to gin up even the most cliched, regurgitative paintings by the most cynical of artists. (It’s not dull, it’s atemporal!) Above all, it imputes hope and optimism to a situation that might deserve a more honest and dour reckoning. Hoptman sees atemporal painting as “a hopeful, invigorating quest”, and conceives of the end of avant-gardism as a chance to explore infinite possibilities. Might it not more decently be conceived as a desperate flailing, an irresistible but impossible effort to find a way out of a situation where art’s only value is economic? Instead of recoding a lack of progress in art as the new progress, maybe we should take a hard cold look at where we are, accept the fact that we’re stuck, and ask how we got here and why. Being stuck is no vice. If art seems not to have a very bright future, at least that means it’s of our time. © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited THE PAINTBRUSH IN THE DIGITAL ERA ‘The Forever Now,’ a Survey of Contemporary Painting at MoMA By Roberta Smith Dec. 11, 2014 “The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World” has been a long time coming. The Museum of Modern Art has steadily been acquiring new painting, as a visit to its website will confirm. But for years it has disdained actually saying anything about the state of the medium in exhibition form, and all the while painting has developed actively on numerous fronts. “The Forever Now,” which opens Sunday and is organized by Laura Hoptman, curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA, considers some of those changes, and it does so with a normal combination of successes and shortcomings, including a lack of daring. Its thesis hinges on the word atemporal, inspired by “atemporality,” which was coined by the science fiction writer William Gibson in 2003. The idea is that, especially in the digital era, culture exists in a state of simultaneity, where all of history is equally available for use. It could be argued that simultaneity is nothing new: It was once the definition of postmodernism; it also describes the ways artists selectively consider past art alive and useful, and can be a cover for simple derivativeness — a condition not entirely absent from the exhibition. The terrain the show stakes out is diverse and fairly recent, but also very familiar: The 17 artists represented here are all known, mostly market-approved entities familiar to anyone who follows contemporary art even casually. Nearly all the participants possess résumés dotted with solo shows in smaller museums and at blue-chip galleries, here and abroad; 12 of the artists are already represented in MoMA’s collection. In short, this exhibition looks far too tidy and well behaved, much as you might fear a show of recent painting at the Modern would look: validating the already validated and ready for popular consumption. For the majority of the museum’s visitors who rarely set foot in commercial galleries, the show may hold surprises and even mild frissons of shock. And this exhibition may also exceed the expectations even of gallery-scene regulars. Against the odds, it is surprisingly engaging. It gives you plenty to look at, which has become something of a rarity with shows of recent art at the Modern. (It’s when you consider what else could be here that the problems begin.) The show is actually less predictable than the list of names would imply. It helps that there are new works by several artists. Some, like Julie Mehretu, have pushed into new territory (in her case, from drawing closer to painting, of a decidedly Twombly-esque sort). If you focus intently, you can get an expanded appreciation of some of the artists. The much ballyhooed young painter Oscar Murillo , for example, shows several reasonably promising new paintings, albeit all lent by one of his galleries, which should have been avoided. Although it occupies galleries that are too small for close to 100 pieces, the show has been smartly installed. The sequence of works and the conversation about current painting that it presents in real space is one of its primary strengths. It is arranged in largely contrapuntal exchanges between extremes: spare and labor-intensive; little or no color and lots of it; improvisation and deliberation; and riffs on Minimalism and reconsiderations of Expressionism, both abstract and figurative. And in plotting this conversation, Ms. Hoptman makes highly effective use of the narrow, dead-end space at her disposal, dividing it crosswise with walls, including four free-standing ones. Consequently, artists drop in and out of sight, and different ones are prominent, when you retrace your steps, as you must. The work of Josh Smith , possibly the most rough-edged artist here, is (perhaps deliberately) invisible until you reach the show’s final space and turn around. Mr. Smith’s nine canvases insouciantly sum up the show’s no-holds-barred attitude, tripping the light fantastic with works variously monochrome, gestural and figurative, as well as a kitschy sunset and the artist’s signature, writ goofily large. The contrasts among artists are sometimes so glaring they seem sure to set even a novice’s mind in motion. At the entrance, the large elaborately textured and tinted, latently Symbolist paintings on paper by Kerstin Brätsch — which suggest masses of rustling silks or feathers — flank a wall of works from which they could not be more different: Joe Bradley’s emblems simply outlined in grease pencil on raw canvas, redolent of children’s drawings. But the rich detail of Ms. Brätsch’s works attunes you to the unexpected subtleties of Mr. Bradley’s bare-bones approach. The rudimentary perpendicular forms of his “On the Cross,” for example, are enhanced by repeated diagonal creases in the canvas, intimating the wrapping of a bandage, a shroud or swaddling. Rashid Johnson’s voluptuous black paintings, whose thick graffitilike marks are scrawled into a mix of wax and black soap with a broom handle, confront the more delicate and colorful improvisations of Michaela Eichwald, which look impressive but more decorous than usual. After that comes a conversation about carefully but thickly applied paint that is one of the show’s best face-offs. To one side: Mark Grotjahn’s palette knife loops of color, which define a deep space but are also scattered with oblique features, and Nicole Eisenman’s forthright, masklike faces, laid on in thick, textured slabs of color. They recall the early modernist visages of Alexej von Jawlensky , but on a contemporary scale and with references to our political present: a raised (white) fist here, collages of African sculpture elsewhere. Sometimes the show makes such clear points, you can get the impression that artists or works were chosen to fill slots, to demarcate positions as much as for themselves. You almost imagine Ms. Hoptman going down a punch list. Interactive? Check: Mr. Murillo has an additional eight unstretched canvases on the floor that visitors can unfold and look at, like rugs at a bazaar. Minimalism? Check: Matt Connors is represented by an immense three-panel work in sharp, non-primary hues of red, yellow and blue. Purposefully made so tall it can only lean against the wall, it evokes everything from Barnett Newman’s “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue” painting to Richard Serra’s steel plates. Painting as deconstruction? Check: Dianna Molzan’s piquant explorations of canvas, stretcher and paint improve upon the French Surface/Support group of the 1960s. Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story Abject-art deprivation and the trendy “de-skilling”? Check. Richard Aldrich’s elegantly offhand works, one of which has strips of painted wood and canvas at right angles to the canvas. His spare works face the excessive but smooth-surfaced paintings of Michael Williams, whose crazed, partly printed tapestries of color, cartoons and airbrushed lines make the digital and the handmade all but indecipherable. Mr. Williams ends the show on a very promising note. There’s one way that “The Forever Now” is something of a landmark: Nine of its 17 artists are women. A large-group show that is over 50 percent female is beyond rare and sets a standard for other museums (and commercial galleries) to match. Less cheering is this demographic detail: With one exception, all the older artists are women, all the younger are men. And only three are not white. And yet it’s not just about numbers. This show also reminds us that a more open art world allows male and female artists alike to have inflated reputations, which I think is the case with Amy Sillman, Charline von Heyl and Ms. Mehretu. They’re perfectly good painters, but no better than, say, Joanne Greenbaum, Dona Nelson, Sadie Benning and Katherine Bernhardt, any of whom might have disrupted the conversation here a bit more. Another possibility would have been the irrepressible Mickalene Thomas. It’s great to think of her extravagant depictions of proud black women in this well-done but too-safe show. It makes you wonder what’s so scary about surveys of current painting. © 2014 The New York Times Company ‘FOREVER NOW’ IS MOMA’S MARKET MOMENT By Jerry Saltz 14.12.12 The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World Installation view of The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World at MoMA. Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World at the Museum of Modern Art arrives, curated by Laura Hoptman, at a moment when painting is in an astonishingly conflicted but promising abysm of wakefulness. A group show about this stirring medium, at this moment and in the very House of Modernism, sends shock waves through the art world — anointing artists, starting arguments, performing operatically contested desires and new standards. It’s the kind of thing that friends stop being friends over. Or thats what shows like Forever Now used to be — when time moved slower, information wasnt instantly accessible everywhere at once, museums were codifiers and curators defending their absolute power positively, or ridiculously. Im not nostalgic for the dreaded age of curator-bullies, and now that galleries and biennials do most of the codifying, I love that museums have the luxury of time to sift through things rather than react to every twist of aesthetic fate (although too many museums are trying to be like galleries — more on that later). Forever Now is handsome, professional, well intentioned, and has moments that take the breath away. Im a fan and was an early advocate of a third of its 17 artists. Yet, overall, Forever Now doesnt capture enough of paintings pangs, conflict, promise, or current astonishment at its position. Most of all, with a handful of exceptions, the show fails to make a case for the exceptional quality, or truly new character, of contemporary painting; For long stretches, it instead settles for showcasing its ubiquitous presence. If MoMA is the Ferrari of Modernist museums, Forever Now is driving it like a Prius: something made to have minimum impact on the environment while making people feel okay about something troubling. How did this happen? Hoptman is nobodys fool. Highly admired, even loved in the art world, she is a lucid thinker and writer and has long been a remarkably perceptive curator, among the first proponents of early-1990s artists like John Currin, Luc Tuymans, Elizabeth Peyton, Gabriel Orozco, and Chris Ofili. I count myself lucky to call her a friend and to have known her for more than 25 years. The roster of artists she has chosen is revealing. Thirteen of the artists in Forever Now are American; all but one of the rest are from Germany. Age-wise, theres a 30-year spread with Amy Sillman being almost 60 and Oscar Murillo nearly 30. This is not a show to define a generation, since the artists are not of a generation as that term has typically been used. Instead, they are all participants in a cultural moment, in which painting has come to reign supreme, defined by virtuosic newness, of course, but more and more by the basic stylistic sameness valued by the art market and the art fair in particular. To those in the art world, the list of included artists will seem familiar, almost a lineup of acceptable artists and market darlings, many of whom are represented by major spaces or megagalleries like David Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth, and Marian Goodman. (Although a few do not fall into this category.) Many have had museum retrospectives. Its not the fault of the curator, but most of these artists already fetch enormous prices — some in the millions of dollars — for their work. Indeed, the shows opening found dealers and art advisers parked in front of artists work taking sales orders, as if at an art fair. That feels odd. The job of forging art history over the last 100 years has probably always been in the hands of galleries and artists more than in museums. But its in galleries (and art fairs) more now than ever. This is how it should be, but it has had a deleterious effect of late, causing some curators to transform themselves into Grand Guignol showmen specializing in big productions and spectacle, arriving at every art event, moving on to the next, and in between making atrium exhibitions, film screenings, and the like. Other curators contract, demonizing anything successful or of the art world and embrace a kind of Curatorial Correctness — specializing in the rediscovery of the assistants of famous artists or other overlooked makers of the recent past (in other words, safer, quieter projects that make fewer grand claims about what is new or newly important). Some say that the market has taken over everything. There was a panel this week titled Zombie Formalism, the term for precisely this kind of look-alike abstraction. Painter Walter Robinson who coined the term, remarked, If bad abstraction is the problem then the virus spreading it is money. Its true — the market loves abstraction as an easy-on-the-eyes investment and surefire sign of being avant-garde and radical. But Hoptman is too good a curator, with too much integrity, to ever follow the whims of the market. Yet so many of the artists in Forever Now are critically or market approved that the exhibition has the feel of the validation of the inevitable. How does this happen, and what does it mean? Maybe it’s that curatorial impulses and market judgments are no longer separate enough that it makes sense to talk about one or the other taking over. The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World. Hoptman writes in the catalogue that the seventeen artists in this show are stalwart practitioners of painting qua painting. For those not conversant in art-speak, painting qua painting means, technically, painting as painting. What it seems to mean to those in the art world is painting about painting. Or painting about the processes of making paintings; or about the history of making paintings; or maybe about paintings modes, compositional approaches, color theories, materials, marks, and subject matters. Or something. Frankly, this is not all that different from what we used to simply call “abstract painting.” And in fact, it’s not hard to see the painting collected here, and the broader painting universe from which it’s drawn, partly as an expression of some nostalgia about earlier eras, when experiments with form seemed to offer something like truly radical content. (There are numerous gestural similarities to the painting of the Abstract Expressionists and the Neo-Expressionists.) Not to say these painters would necessarily acknowledge any of that; I suspect that each one of the included artists would emphatically say that his or her work is not qua painting but just painting. As for what the show says, its subtitle is Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World. Atemporal refers to the conceit that all artistic styles — from cave painting to Pop Art back to Impressionism and Chinese ink drawings — are current, because we see them in the present, a present that collapses the sprawling palimpsest of history and geography into the flat screens of our smartphones. In this view, painterly styles, schools, and gestures all exist free from the limitations of time, history, and, perhaps especially, Modernism’s imperious dictate about always having to change style in order to be Modern, novel, and worthy. All art has always come from other art, and artists have always dug into, repurposed, and outright stolen from and made styles, tendencies, and approaches their own. But the conceit of Forever Now is, I think, that something is different now, that Modernisms incessant ever-forward march seems so last century, so debunked, and with the combined knowledge of the known universe essentially in our pockets, more artists know about more art than ever before. This is probably true. And because of that, the title suggests, they are making art that, for once, isnt about taking the next step forward in art history. I think. But let’s put aside the rhetoric and look at what the show itself tells us. As is often the case with MoMA these days, Forever Now is wedged into too little space. Paintings are hung salon-style, wedged in, given attenuated spaces and little bins, or installed near the top of tall walls meant only for showing the work of Richard Serra. It would have been better had Hoptman been allowed to do 17 one-month one-person shows of each one of these artists somewhere in MoMA to really drill down into their own ideas and make a real statement. Looking around at the statements made by what has been hung, Laura Owens, Nicole Eisenman, Michael Williams, Michaela Eichwald, Kerstin Bratsch, and Joe Bradley all impress. (Josh Smith does, too, although this may have to do with all of his work being jammed together on one wall and generating this massive graphic impact.) Bradleys gigantic squiggles and doodles really have grandeur while simultaneously producing a shock of incredulity at how simple and unfinished looking art is, but how powerful of presence. Similarly, Bratschs giant paintings on paper encased in steel and glass frames leaned against the walls outside the shows entrance look like grossly enlarged book end-papers adorned with crenellated turrets of iridescent paint and colorful aigrette crowns gone mad. I love them. Ditto Eichwalds pliable brown and black Formica-like surfaces of stains, marks, shapes, and scrapes, which have the feel of having gone through excremental fire and survived. I relish the ropy sluicing surfaces of Mark Grotjahn, but his great paintings seem more excellently old-school than newly atemporal. Stalwarts like Amy Sillman, happy inclusion Mary Weatherford, and Charlene Von Heyl come off well. Von Heyl is, to my eye, the most influential artist in art schools today (almost every student loves to mix up different styles, spaces, and gestures in individual canvasses), but one who is falling into the predictable habit of making all the parts of her painting different. Sillman supplies brushy mid-century-like figurative-abstractions à la de Kooning, Diebenkorn, and Guston. It is a style that is easy to be bad at, and one I dont often pay much attention to, but in Sillmans accomplished hands looks strong and also original of color. There are the physically powerful, otherwise bland, almost-monochromes of Rashid Johnson. And some pulled-apart paintings by Dianna Molzan — certainly not a market approved artist, as I don’t think she even has a New York gallery — are placeholders for all the generic deconstructivist art (torn or otherwise attacked canvases, exposed stretcher bars, etc.) thats all the rage. And endlessly boring. Matt Connors, whom Im usually not a fan of and who is the shows token Zombie Formalist, looks fantastic here with a gigantic, leaning three-panel painting that is Ellsworth Kelly and Brice Marden made by Richard Serra. It is painting as architectural fact. International art star and market phenom Oscar Murillo shows his impressive Schnabel-like touch and wonderful color in works that are warm and would look lovely in any living room. Beyond that, they are only elegant. Speaking of which, Julie Mehretu, whose handsome work strikes me as merely decorative, makes a welcome move here. Brava. The problem is that now shes making sooty Cy Twomblys. The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World. So: There is good painting in Forever Now. Very good. Some great. (The show’s last wall of Michael Williams finds an artist so adept at creating complex surfaces that it’s hard to even fix our focus on them.) But it is far too narrow in its focus, giving us only one known strain of contemporary painting that, while shadow-dancing with various methods of reproduction and processes, is all more or less handmade and mostly abstract. Thats it. What does all this abstract atemporality and gestural painting add up to? In the case of the artists I dont like, Id say that dipping into any and all styles of painting and abstraction is a way not to address the anxieties that now exist around painting in general and abstraction specifically. Its become a kind of shelter and sanctuary where instead of making old ideas new (as many artists do now), these artists make old ideas palatable, unthreatening, un-conflicted. Or they make paintings that look like edgy hard-core abstraction, deploying fields of black or monochrome paint; Polke, Richter, or Oehlen–like effects; splashes; all-over composition; switching styles willy-nilly within works. These are all familiar signals that say to viewers and buyers, I know Im an abstract painting, but the fact that I know that means that Im cool and you knowing that I know it makes you cool too. Plus, Im not crass like Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami. Like me. It’s both too confident and too needy. I call this assertive negative content — art whose primary content is what its not. And it’s a startling statement that this negative content is so appealing to people (collectors especially) right now. But what is truly missing here is the sense of painterly anxiety. Not enough of Forever Now lets us in on the storms gathering in the medium, where there is an epic struggle going on, not in spite of the disappearance of modernism’s teleology but precisely because painters working today have had that universe of possibilities collapse on them. On the one hand, artists are ultra-aware of and therefore in an ironical position to paintings processes, endless tropes, styles, ideas, and, therefore, their own work. Perhaps its been ever thus, but its more thus than ever. An artist using Day-Glo color today is also using Warhol; every brushstroke references a hundred other artists; painting on fabric might be Polke, Kippenberger, Salle, Oehlen. And so on — not absolutely, not every time, not intentionally, even, but its there. History and style are now extra-active content. If that were that, we’d be dealing only with self-conscious work. The complication is that while artists are in this ironical position to painting, to them their work is not ironic at all — in fact, it is completely, utterly sincere. Today, artists have an almost Romantic relationship to their own work — even if it is made in a time when they are as self-aware as almost never before. This is because the need to make art and the drive to be an artist still run as deep as ego and insecurity towers high. The tension that now exists between these two previously opposed, now concurrent states, is fusing in some new powerful emotion of being at once sincere and ironic. It is a new interior emotion and the tremendously productive chasm and chaos alive in painting and much art today. I’m thinking, for example, of the blasted-looking abstract paintings of Lucy Dodd; the scorching color and rash repeating orders of Katherine Bernhardt; the erratic organization and Eros of Keltie Ferris; the maybe-too-pretty but hobbled Modernism of Patricia Treib; the all-out discontentedness and retinal attack of Bjarne Melgaard; the insane glutted flat surfaces of Borna Sammak. While I like a lot of the artists in this show, the exhibition as a whole fails to deliver up the restless interiority, forming intellectual constructions, and exigencies that this split is producing. There are places beyond just using abstraction as a cruise ship or tasting menu. These places can be glimpsed in Forever Now. But the show doesnt venture far enough into this charged, pathos-filled, maybe magisterial arsenal of internal and historical anxiety, insatiable introspection, and outward amplitude. If art really has broken free of time and history — more of the art in Forever Now would not cling to or look like so many of its known safe lifelines. More of this art would not look like what more and more art looks like. Thats why I love the artists I love in this show, and even more why I love all of the artists I love who are not in this show. I almost dont know what to call what theyre making now or how to see it — except with my nerves. Copyright © 2010 - 2014, New York Media LLC.
Posted on: Sun, 14 Dec 2014 10:32:28 +0000
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