Greg Lindquist

Wall Painting Collaboration/Commission

2011-08-15T07:51:00.001-07:00

This wall painting was conceived of for a Murray Hill one bedroom apartment entryway to warmly invite visitors into the space. There's something to explore in projecting spindly naturalistic imagery into the architectural geometry of corners-- and can definitely be explored further. The color choice (not mine) reminds me of rooms containing more ancient work at the Met museum.

After Destiny: The Contemporary American Landscape

2011-08-04T08:25:00.001-07:00

After Destiny: The Contemporary Landscape is a show I have been thinking about since I wrote my art history graduate thesis on the relationship of three contemporary American painters (Will Cotton, Ben Edwards and Rackstraw Downes) to the 19th century Hudson River School painters. I decided to explore and expand contemporary concerns raised in my thesis group of painters, as well as consider photography and the photographic reference for paintings. The exhibition is at Flanders Gallery in Raleigh, NC from 27 July- August 30 and includes Alberto Borea, LaToya Ruby Frazier, myself, Cameron Martin, Mary Mattingly, Ellen Phelan and Xaviera Simmons. To read the essay I wrote for the show, visit Flanders Gallery here.

No One is an Island Artist Statement

2011-06-03T17:10:00.001-07:00

“Earth, that nourish'd thee, shall claim

Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,

And, lost each human trace, surrendering up

Thine individual being, shalt thou go

mix for ever with the elements,

To be a brother to the insensible rock,

And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain

Turns with his share, and treads upon.”
--Thanatopis, William Cullen Bryant

In Landscape- Scene from “Thanatopsis” (1850), Asher Durand envisions the ameliorative influence of nature discussed in Bryant’s eponymous poem. “Thanatopsis” (1821) is a meditation on the eternal cycles of nature as a moral comfort for man facing the inevitability of death. The poem evokes a larger interconnectedness of humans and nature, amid Western expansion, Manifest Destiny and the industrialization of the United States. While Durand’s invented landscape calls to mind the benign grandeur of nature evoked by the Hudson River School, his idealized landscape omits a darker side of nature: disastrous weather, disease, and destruction that challenged human’s desire to tame what was seen as feral.

My directly-painted-on-wall Thanatopsis Revisited (Island, Sanctuary, The Physical World) (2011) reconsiders Bryant’s poem via Durand’s painting, while also addressing the 1970s Earthworks movement. Rather than take the gallery into the landscape, I’m interested in bringing the landscape into the gallery. The imagery is culled site specifically from Governors Island (from the debris of demolished buildings to the silhouettes and shadows of London Plane trees) and I intend for it to quietly overwhelm and eclipse the majestic views of Lower Manhattan from within the gallery. I was thinking about how Frederick Church exhibited The Heart of the Andes with curtains to create an illusion of a window and how the painting, executed before the moving image, now seems cinematic.

The color palette and its depiction of nature extend the nature/human binary, questioning the synthetic/naturalistic definitions in the source of pigment colors. It may appear drained of color, like crepuscular light or the multiple shadows in outdoor lights at night. The echoing shadows appear three-dimensional or sculptural and the shadows of pipes and sprinklers in the gallery space are painted, obscuring the relationship between the painted image and its environment. I want the boundaries of painting to be erased from within, for the image to grow in a way similar to what it depicts.

The painting hung on the wall, Rozel Point (All Things are Interconnected) (2011), faintly depicts a weather worn piling from a defunct oil derrick decking in the vicinity of Robert Smithson’s “The Spiral Jetty.” Splintered by wind tossed salt and sand, the piling also appears as if a live sapling. I enjoy the enigmatic ambiguity, the suggestion that the machined pole is slowly and entropically returning to nature. Even though Smithson hated painting, I think he would have enjoyed this visual metaphor.

Smithson acknowledged the destructive forces of nature, that humans were not the only entities capable of destroying its environment. While today an ameliorative quality exists in many forms of the natural (organic food movement, herbal supplements and therapies, weather-harnessing energies), its destructive tendencies persist (hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, climate changes). Only in an inclusive examination of the natural and human environment will we come closer to a symbiotic relationship with it.

Pretty Vacant Installation Pictures

2011-05-03T05:30:00.000-07:00

Suzanne Stroebe and Greg Lindquist Collaboration

Letter to the Editor: The Natural World has Color
Materials: wood, cement, glass, mirror, water, organic white vinegar, cherry blossoms, shitake mushrooms, tulips, gin, red wine vinegar, bitters, cucumber vine, mold, dill, gentian, vodka, local honey, black turtle bean broth, LED lights, halogen lights, and compact fluorescent bulbs. Dimensions, Structural Integrity Variable, 2011

“We do not obtain knowledge by standing outside of the world; we know because “we” are of the world.”

--Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” 2003

“Without the artificial coloring FD&C Yellow No. 6, Cheetos Crunchy Cheese
Flavored Snacks would look like the shriveled larvae of a large insect. Not surprisingly, in taste tests, people derived little pleasure from eating them. Gummi worms without artificial coloring would look, like, well, muddily translucent worms. Jell-O would emerge out of the refrigerator a watery tan. No doubt the world would be a considerably duller place without artificial food coloring.”

-- Gardiner Harriss, The New York Times, April 2, 2011

“The FDA was founded a century ago to ensure the American people a safe & healthy food supply. It is not meant to put the best interest of food manufacturers and/or producers before the consumer, which is exactly what the FDA did this month by not considering a ban or even a warning label on food containing the dyes. It’s shameful that something as frivolous as food coloring–something that could potentially harm our children’s health and future success and adds absolutely no nutritional value to the food product–has been overlooked by the FDA. Perhaps it is because it was found to only affect those children already suffering from behavior problems? Maybe the FDA is right –it may be easier to simply feed our children multiple drugs for their ADD and ADHD than to deal with the root of the problem and deny them their Froot Loops.”

-- Michelle Stroebe, A Letter to The New York Times in Response to Harriss

“We're the flowers in the dustbin, We're the poison in the human machine, We're the future, we're the future.”

--Sex Pistols, “God Save the Queen”

Dill, Red Wine Vinegar and Water

Tulip and Water and Gin

Local Honey and Water and LED light

Studio Grown Rosemary and Wine and Water

Cherry Blossoms and Vodka

Black Turtle Bean Broth

Rising into Ruin Installation, Raleigh, NC

2011-04-04T21:26:00.001-07:00

Installation of Ober Gallery Gallery solo show "Odes (to the present forgotten)" in Kent, CT.

2010-10-04T11:50:00.001-07:00

Obsessed and Impassioned about All Things Klein

2010-09-12T07:16:00.000-07:00

Saturday night at The Brooklyn Rail headquarters: I'm attending a party for the artseen staff. The occasion was to meet fellow writers, many of whom I haven't met. I'm talking with William Powhida, passing a flask of Sazerac Rye (I'm a bit of a snob about spirits) around when a guy walks up drinking a TGIF Fridays Mudslide in a glass container. I playfully chide him for drinking a "Mudslide," a pre-mixed "cocktail" I associate with my high school girlfriend's mother, who occasionally allowed us as teens to have a sip. It's also probably a synthetic concoction of high fructose corn syrup, chocolate flavor, alcohol and milk solids.

"I'm Hrag," he says.

"I'm Greg," I reply. I recognize his name, a fellow writer at the Rail whose writing I have admiringly followed since he reviewed someone with whom I went to grad school.

"What's your last name?"

I tell him, which makes Hrag enraged.

"You wrote this month about Yves Klein and Terence Koh."

"Right...?" I say.

"I fucking hate Terence Koh!" Because of you, his dealer tweeted that the Brooklyn Rail said Terence Koh was as great a Yves Klein!"

"Well, it was only a mention," I stammer, caught off guard.

"I'm going to kick your ass! I hate Koh!" he says, now pretty irate.

"It was my girffriend's idea!" I retort, which it was-- she's pretty sharp.

With that, Hrag exits the party. "Maybe I shouldn't have provoked him and his mudslide," I told William, "I just got blasted."

In all honesty, I am no authority on Koh's work, but on the other hand, I simply said, "Terence Koh’s installations, which often reveal his obsession with all things white or nothing at all but light, come to mind when thinking of Klein’s pursuit of the immaterial." And: Koh's dealer's twitter post simply said, "Terence Koh mentioned in Yves Klein article..cool with me!"(3:27 AM, Sep 4). Which is pretty much what it was. And maybe the fact the tweet suggests some surprise to find the two artists connected says something. And admitting influence doesn't necessarily stake approval in where Koh has possibly taken Klein's ideas of the immaterial.

I admire Hrag's passion. What about Koh would give you that sort of emotional response? What about Koh's work inspires such an inflamed reaction? Hrag, I admit my comparison was glib. I agree that Koh and Klein are nowhere near peers in greatness and I never claimed so. I mentioned but then really didn't expand on it (isn't this a challenge of deadline writing?). If I look further, I may be able to look at Klein's love for celebrity, fame, and sensational acts with some sort of similarity to Koh's, especially in their unabashed, extreme narcissism. I think Klein would have loved to design Lady Gaga's piano, or paint her white (blue) as a performace. And, Hrag, can you hate Koh without hating Klein-- and what aspect of Klein's universe? What distinguishes the two? Where do you draw the line? I'm just curious.

Installation view of “Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers” (2010). Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

Peter Schjeldahl defines "taste" as a "sediment of aesthetic experience, commonly somebody else's." I think he has said it quite right. We acquire many tastes through association, through friendships and social circles. I think I recognized this in high school when I was explaining to an older friend that a girl I liked didn't like hardcore punk music. "Hardcore is an acquired taste," my friend admitted. Also, I really hated whiskey when I first tasted it, but now, it's probably my liquor of choice. I also avoid high fructose corn syrup, which is like the heroin of sweeteners, turning off our brain's ability to tell us when we're satiated.

After writing a review for this month's Brooklyn Rail, I decided to trek with my girlfriend back to DC for one last look at the Yves Klein retrospective at the Hirshhorn. She hadn't seen it yet. The show is one that you cannot see in reproduction-- the International Klein Blue (IKB) is almost blinding in its brilliance. The sponge sculptures on pedestals are weirdly beautiful all over, evoking the richness of a seascape underwater. But conceptually, thinking about the wide reach of Klein's markmaking, it was a strange timing to discover the NY Times article on Dan Colen.

Dan Colen, far right, and assistants drag a canvas behind an all-terrain vehicle.

The Colen article is part press release, part human interest story, includes a photo essay detailing how several of Colen's process-based works were made. Several's final products were paintings with various mark making inventions, like chewed and heated bubble gum, or canvases pulled through tall, lush Connecticut grass with all terrain vehicles (Klein made paintings using grass as a sort of paintbrush and relief printmaking technique. Another work was a sculpture, a skateboard half pipe, marred by skateboard wheels, displayed upside down as a bridge-like form. Judging from the conversations I've had, many art worlders are loving to hate this artist's debut show at Gagosian. But I secretly wished I would have written Dan Colen's show into the Klein article, be it suffer a similar protest as the Koh comparison.

Yves Klein, “Untitled Blue Sponge Sculpture (SE 89),” c. 1960.

The only comparison Roberta Smith made in her review of the Klein show feels glib and I wish to have heard more about her thoughts on Judd and Klein, knowing her affection for Judd: "Donald Judd, whose extensive use of fiery cadmium red light in his early painted wood pieces was partly if not wholly indebted to Klein, wrote admiringly that Klein’s paintings were “the only ones that are unspatial.” It's disappointing that Smith only quotes from Judd's "Specific Objects," which signals how Minimalism co-opted Klein's monochromes, Judd adding that "Klein's blue paintings are narrow and intense." If you still might need convincing, look no farther then the visual comparison below of Klein's IKB "stack," (a piece in the exhibition that I am surprised Smith didn't comment about) made in 1957, to Judd's stack pieces, the first in 1967 and second in 1990.

Yves Klein, “Untitled Sculpture (S 1, 3, 4, 5),” 1957

Donald Judd, Untitled (stack), 1967

Donald Judd, Untitled, 1990

It appears Judd didn't write about Klein until January 1963, a year after Klein died. I find Judd's review more insightful than his mentions in "Specific Objects": "Copious Publicity and Klein's own shenanigan's proclaimed him the best, the newest of young artists. It seems to have been true. But although the biggest frog, he was the biggest frog of a stagnant pond." Judd goes on to describe the Anthropomotries as "a touching imprint of a neat butt," then, not surprising, declaring that "The blue paintings are the interesting ones; the others, despite their flamboyant means, are not unusual." Judd says that Klein's paintings have "an unmitigated, pure but very sensuous beauty...There is nothing which objectifies or mitigates the pungent beauty but it's difficult strength." Only Judd could look at rounded edges in these paintings and declare them "erotic blue objects."

Yves Klein, “La Rêve du Feu” [The Dream of Fire], c. 1961.

Later at the Rail party, James Kalm and I stood around the barbeque as he tended the coals, played in the fire watching the flames glimmer as food sizzled. James and I talk about Klein and his eccentric, conceptual reaches. "Well, you know," James said "There are some people who say that Klein was hooked on amphetamines and that his heart attack was induced by his stimulant habits. " Even though the documentary at the Hirshhorn claims Klein had a heart attack at a screening for a documentary that mocked his Anthropometrie performances, I knew in my heart that James may have been right. After all, Klein played with fire and wanted to at least maintain the illusion that he could hold it in the palm of his hand.

Frozen Moments, Installation Images, Tbilisi, Georgia

2010-08-21T08:18:00.000-07:00

Frozen moments: Architecture Speaks Back is a project organized by the Laura Palmer Foundation in Poland addressing and taking place in the enigmatic Ministry of Transportation building in Tbilisi, Georgia. The Ministry of Transportation building is viewed by many Georgians as an eyesore and relic of the Soviet era, although many young Georgian artists admire the building. Recently bought by the Bank of Georgia, the building has somehow been turned over to a week of cross platform installations, performances, talks and activities that address the building and a constellation of political, economic, aesthetic and architectural associations.

My project involved producing two paintings that captured iconographically and with typological depiction, the Ministry building. Inspired by the history of the country's transportation-- from the Silk Road, to the efficient Soviet system to the present disruption through internal conflict-- I wanted to track the paintings' shipment as a conceptualization of the path of physical image data rather than digital. The paintings' banner-like installation suggest a dematerialization, deflation and decomposition of not only the painting as object but also the architecture in which it is placed.

The project is sprawling and here you can see an extensive photo album with the diversity of projects. Some of my favorite are: Urban Guerrilla Gardening , photographic installations and murals. Below are installation shots from my work, as well as work by Gio Sumbadze and Koka Ramishvili.

Description of Goods on Invoice: Painting, (brushed oil and acrylic on

unstretched canvas). The perceived value of these

paintings are not in their commercial cost but rather

in their conceptual and contextual worth, which is

created in part by this documentation and shipping

process.

Shipments One and Two, Installation View in Ministry of Transportation Building

From left to right, Greg Lindquist, Gio Sumbadze (on columns) and Koka Ramishvili (on right wall)

Greg Lindquist, Documentation from Transportation of Painting

Shipments One and Two, Installation View in Ministry of Transportation Building

Koka Ramishvili, Installation View

Gio Sumbadze, Installation View

Open reception View, July, 2010

Ministry of Transportation Exhibition, Tbilisi, Georgia

2010-07-15T18:51:00.001-07:00

Shipment Number One, oil and metallic on canvas, 2010

I will be participating a research-based, context–responsive art project at the site of the former Ministry of Highways of the Soviet Republic of Georgia and future Bank of Georgia. This project is titled “Frozen Moments: Architecture Speaks Back” and is organized by Joanna Warsza of the Laura Palmer Foundation in Poland.

Georgia’s transcaucascus location makes it a crucial commercial transit route, dating back to the Silk Road, which linked China with Europe. Since inheriting a well-developed Soviet transportation system in 1991, Georgia’s interrelated economic instability and political unrest have contributed to its deterioration. Political conflict with the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in the northwest regions of Georgia has closed principle rail and highway links between Russia and Georgia, while armed conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan has disrupted Tbilisi’s rail lines to Erevan, Armenia. These situations have hindered plans for establishing modern transportation hubs for transshipments of Iranian oil west across the Caucasus. In addition, Georgia’s conflict with the breakaway regions has weakened investments in Georgia’s 370-kilometer pipeline from Baku, Azerbaijan to Batumi, Georgia.

Shipment Tracking of paintings to Tbilisi.

Such transportational difficulties translate to shipping impediments for receiving international parcels. Paradoxically, although Georgians can visit Amazon’s website, they cannot order any of its merchandise to Georgia, which creates a high material demand for such items as perfumes, skateboards, electronics and other books and media not available through the internet for download. These restrictions create interesting conceptual and technological boundaries between what can be acquired materially (physical transit) and virtually (file-based downloads). For example, although some of Artforum’s print content can be accessed via website, in order to obtain a physical copy, a Georgian must subscribe via DSL or Fed-Ex courier service, which is not completely reliable. Also, these formal economic and consumer structures also stand in contradistinction to informal exchange of goods and monies, such as at the Drybridge in Tbilisi, where an array of old and new items are available directly and immediately.

The project I propose as collaboration with and through Urban Research Lab is to create, ship and track several oil paintings of the Ministry of Transportation building. As utopian architecture, the design evokes the efficiency of the Soviet’s system, which was inspired by such diverse influences as El Lissitzsky’s Horizontal Skyscrapers, Villa Spatiale, and the Japanese Metabolists. These paintings will address the building as an iconic and symbolic structure of the Modernist grid, reflecting order, efficiency and of human’s ability to conquer nature. In addition, the paintings, and their transit will reflect the complex palimpsest of contexts the site evokes, traversing environmental, political and economic boundaries from the United States to Georgia. Their digital sources (some paintings based on reference images transmitted via internet from Sumbadze to Lindquist) yet physical/illusionistic constructions allude to the uneven transportation (physical and virtual) infrastructures from which Georgians obtain information. The paintings, shipped rolled in a tube, via Fed-Ex’s “International Economy” service will be tracked with Fed-Ex’s service. Their location in transit will be posted on Urban Research Lab’s site until reaching Tbilisi and is part of the piece’s infrastructure.

Shipment Number Two, oil and metallic on canvas, 2010

Group show at Ober Gallery in Kent, CT

2010-03-30T13:25:00.001-07:00

Elizabeth's cat, Gracie

On the way to visit my NY dealer Elizabeth Harris in CT, Suzanne and I visited Rob Ober, an energetic, enthusiastic new dealer in Kent, CT with whom I'll be working. His current exhibition of gallery selections includes two of my paintings.

Dinner at Dick and George's house out of a fairy tale.

Verge Art Fair: Art held in crossfire

2010-03-23T09:04:00.000-07:00

Two sculptures on the curb of Dylan Hotel ready to be held hostage.

At the end of February, I was contacted by Nurture Art to participate in the Verge Art Fair. Eduoard Steinhauer, Verge’s artistic director, was looking for sculpture to display and they were very interested in some of my new cement boxes. After reviewing Verge’s site and finding some familiar names of people whom I respect and admire, Beth Rudin DeWoody and Dan Cameron’s included, I was excited to participate and about the context for the new work. The installation of the show was extremely disorganized, but nothing unusual for these events. However, the problems and suspicions arose when Mr. Steinhauer failed to notify Nurture Art’s contact person about the details of pick-up for the work, appearing to have turned his phone off, allowing his voice mail to become full.

Three days after the fair ended, Wednesday, March 10, I visited the Dylan Hotel in midtown, the site of Verge Art Fair. I spoke with Ferran Sanfelimon, the Dylan Hotel’s managing director, who informed me that because Mr. Steinhauer owed the hotel a $10,300 balance, he was holding the remaining artworks, which were deemed per contract property of the art fair once the individual artists delivered their work. We argued for about 45 minutes, insisting that I needed the two sculptures and three paintings for the solo exhibition opening at Elizabeth Harris Gallery which would be installed the following Tuesday. Mr. Ferran politely stated that his lawyer advised him not to release the work, the only apparent leverage that the hotel had via the individual artists to pressuring Steinhauer to coming forward and settling/negotiating his debts. We agreed to be reasonable and work together to ensure the work’s return and their debts be settled.

I then contacted Karen Marston, Nurture Art’s executive director, who was extremely upset and in turn contacted Nurture Art’s Volunteer Lawyer for the Arts attorney, who pointed out that under New York Arts & Cultural Affairs Law Art 12.01, holding art hostage for debt was illegal. After two days of legal discussion amongst lawyers (all work for Nurture Art was done through VLA, pro bono) and pressure applied through mutual acquaintances of Mr. Steinhauer, Dylan Hotel’s lawyer relented and made arrangements for me to pick up my work on Friday, March 12 at 7pm. I was also informed that Steinhauer himself would be there to ensure the hotel was not held liable for any liability or authentication issues. The work was released and picked up without any problems, although it was an extremely awkward situation and circumstances under which to meet Mr. Steinhauer. He was a pathetic mess, not being able to locate all of the work amongst packed boxes. Yet he apologized, claiming it was the hotel’s fault, they were mischarging him and that was why he found it necessary to evade contact with the hotel for three days rather than attempting communication.

In retrospect, I even wonder, if Cameron and DeWoody in fact agreed to be on Verge Art Fair’s selection committee, or if that was a false claim of credibility (I understand this fair previously operated under the name Bridge Art Fair but reformed to shake its already bad rap). I requested for my name and images to be removed from Verge’s website last Monday March 16, 2010; at the moment, it remains.

What did I learn from this affair:

Do your research about a fair, find out who has participated, in what capacity, and what was their experience.
Know your legal rights; always ask for contracts, have a paper/picture trail of your work.
If it doesn't feel right or is too disorganized-- don't participate. You'll save yourself huge future headaches.

Opening Thoughts

2010-03-21T07:37:00.000-07:00

Here's an entry about thoughts on openings.

Work in Progress for Nonpasts

2010-03-08T07:03:00.001-08:00

Setting up a test of "Index/footprint" a time-based decomposition piece, forcing the viewer to negotiate and walk over the concrete casts, destroying them over the course of the exhibition.

varketili-3 queensbridge images of pamphet

2009-12-03T17:39:00.000-08:00

Click on thumbnail for larger view.

varketili-3/queensbridge collaboration

2009-11-26T15:28:00.001-08:00

11:00-13:00 „Varketili 3.4mr 425“ by Caroline Lavoie, Greg Lindquist, Lado Oniani, New Map of Tbilisi, Gio Sumbadze, "url" (urban research lab), in Varketili District House

Georgian-Russian War Film

2009-10-19T00:18:00.001-07:00

The main square of Gori, graced with a heroic statue of Stalin, appeared under siege by what I came to realize were fictional troops. The film, now in production by Die Hard 2 director Renny Harlem, is to detail the five day war in 2008 between Georgia and Russia.

It's rumored that Andy Garcia will play Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili and that also Harlem's role in this movie is in part an attempt to pull himself out of a 90 million dollar bankruptcy deficit as a result of his cringing pirate film Cutthroat Island. I trotted across the plaza to locate a taxi to the cave dwellings as causality extras sat upright on the pavement and film crew escorted me off the location. As I returned from my excursion, I watched them film a scene under the statue, presumably with Harlem himself acting.

Gori, Uplistsikhe

2009-10-16T22:39:00.000-07:00

The town of Gori, population 50,000, is the famous the birthplace of Iosif Jughashvili. His childhood friends nicknamed him "Stalin" or "strong like steel" (according to my guide) and it stayed with him for the rest of his relatively long life. In front of the museum is a modest mud and stone house enclosed by a temple-like superstructure (below).

The Stalin museum is fascinating in its scale and reframed narrative of Stalin's life as a Georgian hero. There is no mention of gulags or mass murders by guides and likewise no photographic evidence. Stalin, like Napoleon, Lenin and Hitler, was a short man-- 1.6 meters, 64 in or 5' 3". He also was a man of vanity: like many contemporary public figures, Stalin understood the value of public image. Having chicken pox as a child, Stalin's private photographers did some serious photo retouching to conceal the craters in his face. Yet, one American journalist happened to get a close up. My guide said he also wore woman's make up. I said to my guide, a young woman, fashioned dressed in all black and stilletos (black hair and eyeliner), "Was Stalin good for the Georgians?" She replied smiling, " Stalin was good for the Russians."

Above is the uber-creepy death mask made from a plaster cast from Stalin's face from his casket. This copy of the cast (original in Moskow) calls attention to his considerably well-aged visage (he was 74 when he died) and an unbelievable thick, full head of hair.

Uplistsikhe is a cave dwelling 20 minutes from Gori founded in 1000 BC. According to my overly eager guide (I was one of two visitors there at 3 pm) the city was 9000 years old, but then again, he also claimed that his grandfather was a childhood friend of Stalin and also this Georgian region is graced with 340 days of sun in one year.

RIP Andropov's Ears

2009-10-15T22:55:00.000-07:00

Destroyed one year ago.

Ministry of Transportation Building

2009-10-14T22:57:00.001-07:00

Built in 1967 or 1977, this Soviet building astonishes me. Like a series of boxcars (or Jenga blocks) stacked on an x and y axis, it cantilevers precariously over a hillside. According to Ana, a Georgian artist I spoke with last night, she says the "upstairs" part of it still is open and in use. The derogatory slang term for this building is "the dick in the ass" for its illogical construction. Yet another Georgian Ana translated this saying to mean "who's fucking who." The building is actually not in use but is owned by the Bank of Georgia, who has renovation plans.

Cement Skatepark

2009-10-14T22:47:00.000-07:00

Matt Chambers and I wandered around the area near the drybridge-- Matt pointed out this skatepark. It's nicely shaped concrete, probably one of the better public parks I have seen. And it looks like a bunch of minimalist sculptures. Most things here are made of concrete or cement in some degree of refinement.

Matt befriended a pack of skateboarding teenagers. He says that getting skateboards in Tbilisi is difficult and costly-- several skaters save up for new decks and then order together to defray the ridiculous shipping costs. As what seems a typical act of generosity for Matt, he offered to give them his deck and skate shoes. In return, one of the skaters gave Matt a ride to the airport in his mother's car.

Rustavi, Part I

2009-10-13T01:19:00.000-07:00

My Georgian driver, David, picks me up at 11:30 am, telling me that on the way to Rustavi, he’ll show me an airplane factory, one that follows the Mtkvari River southwards to Rustavi. This factory employed 25,000 people and was bombed during the war last year with the Russians. Resting on the opposite side of the riverbank, we sprinted across interstate traffic to gaze at a factory that stretched for at least twenty city blocks.

The landscape between Tbilisi and Rustavi is sparse and sprawling. Rolling, verdant hills are punctuated by foundations of buildings, some ruins, a few construction sites. Nearing Rustavi, concrete rectangular highrises appear, lined in a grid, some an unkempt gray, many colorful pastels. The main street slices through these buildings—new town Rustavi. These Soviet-era block apartments were built by German POWs after World War II to accommodate the rapid influx of people who were previously staying in temporary lodgings and slums.

Crossing a bridge, we enter Old Rustavi, a metallurgy industrial center whose core activity was an iron smelting plant, which was built in the 1940s. The main Stalinist building is a riff on classical architecture and looks more like a university façade than a factory. Expanding beyond this building are over 90 large factories dispersed spaciously in the landscape. Incredible, as if an entire Brooklyn neighborhood were nothing but decommissioned factories.

David explains that buses brought the workers from new to old Rustavi. “Those were the good days,” David sighs. “Everyone had a job and made not a lot of money, but enough to live. If you were sick, work was up to you.” The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought the collapse of the Soviet integrated economy, proving disastrous for Rustavi. The majority of the industrial plants were closed, leaving 65% of the city’s population unemployed. Bringing crime and acute poverty, the population shrank from 160,000 in the mid-1990s to 116,000 in 2002. David was an electrician, scientist and professor during these times.

As we drive, I take photographs from inside the car, yelling “Stop!” when I see something to explore on foot. The first place I investigate is a factory fenced off and set off the main pot-holed road. Between the road and the fences are snaking lines of rusted piping. Nearby, two men herd a dozen cows through this maze of pipes. In the distance, several men are digging holes. After shooting for a few minutes, David calls me back to the car, handing me a small aerosol can with Russian text.

“Pepper spray,” he explains. “Maybe you will need for dogs. Take care.” As I continue to take pictures the cows come closer and, as I leave, several dogs. David emerges from the car with a steering wheel lock, shaking it in the dog’s general direction, yelling in Georgian. “Nice dog,” he exclaims.

The multitude of stray cats and dogs here is a major problem. Georgians don’t believe in neutering or spaying, and although few probably can afford to have them, they are everywhere. I watched dogs chase our car throughout the day, some maliciously, some desperately, some on three, some two legs.

The next site is a neighboring foundation with steel beams. It’s difficult to determine whether the construction was completed or it’s decaying. Anselm Kiefer’s work comes to mind as I document this building and the side of the previous building. Across the road are more spindly, skeletal structures that appear incomplete. Massive and vaguely recall the Ikea beams during its construction in Red Hook.

We pass a Donald Judd-like shell of a factory, next to are a few SUVs parked and Georgians sitting in a circle drinking. “No, we will not stop if they are drinking,” explains David. “They will say, ‘Come, come—drink with us.’ I do not want to drink now.” The interior of the next cluster of factories remind me of a train depot warehouse in Raleigh that I crept into with my friends in North Carolina. We hauled guitars and amps inside a cavernous 100,000 square foot space and blasted them, only off the main highway but no one heard. I’m approached by some Georgians sitting outside the buildings. One is yelling at me in Georgian, but David speaks with them and smooths thing over.

Georgian Cats

2009-10-12T11:53:00.000-07:00

The multitudes of stray cats (and dogs) in Tbilisi will break your heart.

Buildings Crumbling, Slowly

2009-10-12T10:41:00.000-07:00

Since Friday, another 10 foot section of the far left wall has crumbled. The first photo is from Friday, the last two from today. I am going to document the collapse every two days. Often steel pipes prop walls, their base cemented in the sidewalk.

Rustavi, More Images and Narrative to Follow

2009-10-12T02:17:00.001-07:00

More about Rustavi here

Ryan McGinness review in Art in America

2009-10-01T14:18:00.001-07:00

My friend Lindsay at McKee Gallery tipped me off to the Ryan McGinness review in which my essay from Ryan McGinness Works is mentioned. Fairly straightforward paraphrasing, except that Urban Outfitters did not merely "pirate the 'look' of his signature silkscreen patterns for a line of t-shirts"-- Urban Outfitters made a Ryan McGinness line of t-shirts, complete with his studio logo and his name and bio on the clothing tag.

Click on thumbnail for larger view of review.

2009-10-01T09:02:00.000-07:00

Women of the Congo at W

BY JUSTIN TERRY

October 20, 2009, 7-10pm

541 Lexington Avenue

New York, New York

A generous evening has been planned for those attending this year’s Women of the Congo’s fund-raiser on October 20^th at the W Hotel in midtown Manhattan. Proceeds will help to fund the City of Joy, a leadership community designed to nurture and strengthen survivors of sexual violence. Set to open in 2010, the City of Joy is being developed by acclaimed playwright and activist Eve Ensler and V-Day – the global movement to end violence against women and girls – along with Unicef. The City will be run by Congolese women and act as a safe haven providing survivors with comprehensive therapy and sexuality education, dance, gardening, public speaking, human rights education, leadership and advocacy skills, and more.

The annual event came to fruition last year when a group of women from the New York area took it upon themselves to do something about the plague of sexual violence against women, which has occurred in the Congo for over a decade. This year’s event has drawn the attention of Whoopi Goldberg, who will introduce Ms. Ensler, as well as lauded jazz-vocalist Madeline Peyroux, who is donating a live performance. Representatives from the international community and the United Nations will also be in attendance.

Justin Terry, February 12, 2008 oil on birch panel 30" x 24"

An important part of the fundraiser includes a silent art auction, organized by Tara Taylor, featuring works from over 40 artists. This year’s auction will have works donated by reputable artists such as Ray Smith, Will Ryman, Evelyne Drouot Wasserman, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, and Vahakn Arslanian.

Lisa Holder, Intervention, 2009, Digital Photograph, 12" x 18"

Other notable contributors include North Carolinian, Lisa Holder whose photography explores contradicting forces latent within humankind as we encounter the brunt of our self-made institutions - government, business, and established religion, to name a few. Ms. Holder does not address these conflictions through overt symbolism but rather makes them felt through the timbre of her imagery and presentation of the human form. In Intervention (2009) one finds a vacant figure hunched in a distressed posture while textures from the photographic process lend the image warmth and softness. Therein exists an eloquent tension that combines violence with a ghostly sensuality, calling to mind a rich tradition of recent women photographers including Francesca Woodman, Sally Mann, and Nan Goldin.

Suzanne Stroebe, Yellow Process (2009)

Several artists who’ve recently received their MFAs from Parsons the New School for Design are contributing works as well. Suzanne Stroebe’s small wall relief, Yellow Process (2009) reflects her interest in Russian Constructivism and minimalist sculpture. Ms. Stroebe collects discarded objects and lovingly assembles them into precarious arrangements that simultaneously suggest advanced organization and its impending collapse. Mary Nangah’s painting Voices in Bondage (2008) posits warm dark violets shielded by a thin veil of netting creating a mood that is hushed yet passionate. Ms. Nangah, who helped to organize the event last year, likens the work to the cause stating, “I painted it at a time when my voice was burdened, I felt like I couldn’t hear myself and no one was listening. No one understood.”

Michelle Folingo has rallied a number of artists from the Hudson River Valley to help support the cause. Chaos and serenity existing in nature is the force behind Mrs. Folingo’s abstracted painting Step Ahead (2009). In Sunday Morning (2008), artist Linda Feaster manages a complex interior scene quite well, lending her nude an expressive essence inspired by the work of Alice Neel, as she lounges in an environ that harkens Richard Diebenkorn’s abstracted planar landscapes. Laura McClanahan’s color photogram, Oreaster Reticulatus (2008), walks the line between micro and macro. The scarlet ribbon-like image comes from a series she calls “Planktonic Constructions” where the artist exposes microscopic views of her own blown glass creating a vibrant imagery that is at the same time cellular and cosmic.

In addition to those mentioned here, many other artists have shown deep generosity through their talents and donations. The effort will help to alleviate the pain and suffering of others while raising awareness of the situation in the Congo. Tickets for the event can be purchased online at www.womenofthecongo.com.

Williamsburg vs Rustavi

2009-09-29T10:02:00.001-07:00

Williamsburg, Brooklyn, USA

Rustavi, (Democratic Republic of) Georgia
image: ani chorgolashvili

Recent Williamsburg Fence Improvements

2009-09-02T16:06:00.000-07:00

ArtOMI Outdoor Installation Images

2009-07-14T09:46:00.001-07:00

Construction/ Process Images

2009-07-14T09:22:00.000-07:00

Apartment in a Field

2009-07-04T14:27:00.000-07:00

Visualization of Proposed Project, ArtOMI, NY

What started with a simple idea of reconstructing the skeletal frame of my Brooklyn apartment in an upstate New York field has become a technical and conceptual adventure. I began negotiating with staff the parameters of my project and there were concerns of time constraints and technical skill levels such as structural issues, ie, will it stand up?

So I then thought why not build it around some trees, which led me to take detours in local tree nurseries when there were no ideal trees in the field. I considered buying a tree with its roots wrapped in a ball of burlap, which I found to cost about $1,000 to purchase the tree and pay to have it planted. Making phone calls, compromising expectations and organizing a pick-up of the tree rather than delivery dropped the price considerably, but then I realized that the idea no longer worked.

Serendipitously, an artist couple down the road from ArtOMI are building a studio, which is creeping through the framing process, offering a perfect model to study:

Isabella and Louis's Future Painting Studio, Omi, NY

Steve, ArtOMI's resident handy man, was eager to impart all sort of technical wisdom. He also was eager to show me Ghent Lumber Yard, which had rough cut 2 by 4's, which means that they look like building material for barns and are actually two by four inches. But, they appeared slightly too stylistically rustic and folk art, arts-and-craft-like. So, finally, after making some phone calls to compare prices, I will be receiving a delivery of fifteen 2X4X8 boards and fifteen 2x4x12 boards.

Ghent Lumber Yard, Ghent, NY

Monotyping Project

2009-07-01T10:46:00.000-07:00

ArtOMI Barn

2009-07-01T09:24:00.001-07:00

The Waste Land

2009-03-11T06:47:00.000-07:00

Reposted from The South Wing feature, by Raquel Laneri.

The Waste Land: Greg Lindquist’s Industrial Landscapes
By Raquel Laneri • Mar 11th, 2009 • Category: Culture, Feature

Ikea's Planned Obsolescence (Everyday Living, Everyday Forgetting), oil and metallic on linen, 13.75 by 39.75 inches, 2009, Courtesy of Greg Lindquist

“Landscape is one of the oldest traditions of painting other than portraiture,” says 29-year-old artist Greg Lindquist in the large, open studio he shares with two other artists in Greenpoint, a largely Polish neighborhood in Brooklyn. His rectangular, steely paintings–some modest, some imposing in their size–hang on the walls, and an enormous wooden panel painted a slightly metallic silver–which will be his next painting–lays on his work table. But Lindquist’s landscapes feel new; panoramic industrial wastelands in cool gray tones painted with metal pigments, these are no water lillies. These are the decaying landfills and boat yards of Staten Island, the languishing factories on the Brooklyn waterfront, the construction sites where modernist buildings are torn down to make way for luxury condos and Ikeas. “These spaces aren’t really beautiful, but I do think there’s some beauty to them,” he says. His work aims to preserve that which is disappearing in the midst of gentrification and outsourcing: the disappearing industrial landscape of New York.

I first met Lindquist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Tall, reedy, porcelain-skinned, soft-spoken, clad in black and gray, he looked exactly like the sort of person you would meet at an art museum, at a press preview, in New York. He was also the only other art lover under the age of 50 walking among the luminous still-lifes of Pierre Bonnard in the Met’s cavernous Robert Lehman Wing, and we sort of bonded in our conspicuous youth. We talked Bonnard, Morandi, writing art reviews (he was on assignment for The Brooklyn Rail) and his own (gasp!) landscapes. I was intrigued. Landscapes: how outre, old-fashioned, unpostmodern! He invited me to see his paintings; I said sure. I was happy I did.

As the up-and-coming artist prepares for his solo exhibition “Brooklyn Industry,” opening Wednesday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and running through April 26, he takes some time to chat about art, Ikea, MTV’s The Real World Brooklyn, and getting out of New York.

I showed some of your photographs to my cousin, and she asked, “Oh, are these photographs or paintings?” Well, you do paint from photographs, and you’ve written about contemporary landscape and its relationship to digital photography and media. What is the relationship–and how do your work relates to that?

So, I basically wrote about three contemporary landscape painters who were all connected through referencing the Hudson River School Tradition, which was in the early 1800s/ late 1700s, these painters documenting United States’ uncharted, undeveloped territory. Basically what I found was that all three painters either embraced or rejected technology in their processes.

So, for example, Will Cotton, who makes these elaborate ginger bread houses and confectionary sculptures of landscapes out of sweets–he takes still photography as well as video, and he uses those to use as visual references for his final paintings. Benjamin Edwards actually creates corporate architecture through home architectural-rendering programs that are like autocat but are for the general person who wants to redesign their garden or re-landscape their property. So he actually uses that and he projects the images with a digital projector.

And then Rackstraw Downes–the third artist–actually rejects technology completely and the use of photography. He paints on site, and he paints only with an easel and a paintbrush. He doesn’t see any type of reference photographs, and ironically enough, his work kind of encompasses these panoramas that very much look like a fish-eye lens, so they look like photography.

My work is kind of a combination of all those things. I mean, I work from photographs–photographic references–so I’ll actually go to these places with a camera and take all these pictures, and then I’ll come back to my studio and I’ll manipulate stuff and crop in Photoshop, adjust levels, make things lighter or darker. And then I make slides, and I work from the slides–onto the canvasses. So it’s kind of interesting because when you are looking at those things the computer–it’s a photograph of a painting that’s done from a photograph, so there’s kind of this imbrications of translations that happen from the initial space that’s documented to what you’re looking at when you’re looking at a reproduction of it.

What about photography as an end-means?

Well, that’s kind of interesting, because when I was in grad school I was doing these drawings that were charcoal, and I was erasing out the charcoal and I was making these–they sort of looked like daguerreotypes. One of my professors looked at the photograph I was working from–it was black and white–and he said “This is better than your paintings” and “you should just do this.” It was kind of like a back-handed compliment, but … I could have done just that. But at the end of the day, I want to make a painting, I don’t want to take photographs. And there’s a long history of painters working from photographs, from Manet to Gerhard Richter, who kind of blurred out the images even more with paint. So I’m taking the structure from the photograph and then applying that to a painting in which I am engaged in the material aspects of making a painting.

Talking about documentation, you document things in transition, places being built or rebuilt–the Brooklyn waterfront, for example. I was wondering, when you were talking about going to the Eastern Bloc the other day to paint the site of a concrete factory, if that is a place in development, or is it just aesthetically like the places you like to paint? If you’re not painting something that’s in transition, how does that change your work, how does that change your approach?

That’s a good question, because as you said a lot of these are about places in transition, I mean, you have these decrepit, run-down industrial buildings, which used to be factories, and now they’re kind of being transformed into these commercial condos and residential places. To me this is an economic phenomenon. I’ve talked to my brother, who’s an international economist for the Treasury, and I said, “You should write an essay for this book I’ll do one day about the economics of decay.” It’s an interesting idea because these places exist in part because the real estate value allows them to, because, there’s no value….

So I think, to answer your question, it’s a different part along that same continuum of decay and renewal, although it’s–it’s like if you look at it at an arc then it’s an earlier stage and about Azerbaijan and Georgia, I mean, there’s been a huge economic boom since the collapse of dissolution of the Soviet Union, and so, as I understand it–I mean I don’t know a lot about this but–what I have done from research is that the Soviet Union had annexed these countries and basically they had one place, for example, in a country where all the concrete was made for the whole Soviet Union so you had these sprawling factories that when the Soviet Union collapsed they just shut down. And because Georgia is under a free economy now, it’s kind of struggling to rebuild, so there’s a lot of decay. It’s still a very poor country and these spaces are kind of decrepit–nature has reclaimed them and overgrown. So I’m getting this sense that it’s going to be like that until its economy picks up even more.

Also Azerbaijan has this huge oil industry, so there are these oil fields that are shut down … And so right now part of the boom, in part, is because of this oil line that goes from the Caspian Sea to Turkey. So there’s all this building in a very similar way as the Brooklyn waterfront. So it would be interesting to kind of see how visually these forms compare.

Because I’m interested in the forms of decay too–how it looks. A lot of these buildings I look at were [built] around the same time as modernism–modernist architecture–and in fact some of the buildings are made by architects who inspired modernism architects. The interesting thing is Soviet architecture at the time–you think of the big high-rises that are like concrete boxes–that is all part of modernism, but it has a different form–I mean, it has the same form but a different application. I’m kind of interested in what the visual relationships are here and how the idea of modernism was applied to different things. When you think of modernism, you think of institutional buildings, you think about the Guggenheim, not necessarily factory architecture, or Soviet architecture for that matter.

That’s interesting because a lot of talk about your work has taken the sort of gentrification angle, and now you’re speaking about form and aesthetics. You take your paintings from here and they are all informed by your living here and seeing the community change. How does it change when you go somewhere you’ve never been before?

One of the reasons why I felt like I needed to go somewhere else, well, first of all other than New York, [was] because this is part of my experience, this is part of my every day routine. These spaces I know very well. Because of that, I feel like there’s this sort of blind-sightedness that happens to them, where I’m doing these things and I can’t really see them for what they are. And so if I were going to go somewhere else, especially somewhere I’ve never been before, hopefully I will see them in a way that is completely new, and I’ll see them in a different perspective. So it’ll be an interesting thing to see what happens and also how it relates so what are the issues here at hand outside of gentrification and preservation of architecture, especially when our country is so relatively young … I mean the idea of “ruin” being applied to this architecture is kind of weird because you think about “ruins” and you think about Rome, you think about thousands of years of buildings that have survived, and this is like a hundred years–our country’s history is not much older than that.

How did you get into these decaying landscapes? How do you find your subjects? Like with [the Williamsburg paintings], was it just something you saw and connected with or were you looking for it specifically to document?

So, basically I went to NC State University college of design, which has, historically, its architectural program–it has a huge link to Black Mountain College–all these Bauhaus architects were there, Frank Lloyd Wright … So I had friends who were architecture students. One of my friends, Pace, he was obsessed with this mall, and at this point it was being torn down … This was the biggest indoor mall on the East Cost between Washington D.C. and Atlanta … So he and my other friends started going there at night and breaking into as it was being gutted and taking photographs, exploring it. And we went while it was being gutted and it was this really strange space of absence when you have these stores that have display cases that are completely empty, there’s no people around, they are like ripping up tiles on the stairways it literally looked apocalyptic, like it was being bombed out. And coincidentally that was around the same time that we went to war. So it was, in terms of synchronicity, it felt really big and timely of an event.

What it was being torn down for was a mixed-use community mall, which would have condos, have shop fronts and restaurants, so you know it’s kind of on the same trajectory as gentrification and the whole idea of mixed use and how that effects your relationship to places … We went back after it had been wrecked, and I remember describing it, and what I was describing was–like the steel girders were exposed and the rubble and the rebar and the concrete–and what I was describing was exactly what I am looking at now and what I am fascinated by–how things are put together, how they’re built, how they decay, how they’re torn apart. At some point you are looking at something that you don’t know whether it’s being built or torn down. … It’s interesting to see these parallels and these recurring themes.
It’s interesting to think about this in terms of longevity, I mean this idea from the ’60s of planned obsolescence, that you’re buying something that’s going to fall apart and that you’re going to throw it away for whatever reason because a year from now something will be better or more updated.

It also dovetails into Ikea’s mission because Ikea is this cheap designer furniture and appliances and accessories, and they’re all like flat packed so they’re economically shipped, and also it’s made to fall apart. Kind of like H&M clothes. I mean, I feel like H&M clothes fall apart as they fall out of fashion. And so this whole idea of architecture and what it means and how long it’ll be there.

So, do you see this cycle changing now with the recession? Obviously there are still things being built, but …

Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, I’m not an economist, but I thought about that a lot when this was happening. Like, oh looks like this might not be the same, or this might change and things might slow down. And things did slow down … but it will eventually pick back up.

You said once that the most ironic thing that could happen would be if someone buys one of your paintings and then puts it up in their condo. But, one of your paintings was on MTV’s The Real World, I mean, that’s a similar thing because that was in Red Hook, one of the places you’ve painted. How was that?

That was in part why I did it, because I thought it was so just so absurd and funny. I mean, of a painting about the gentrification of Brooklyn being put … and the ironic thing about that is when I went to a wrap party for the show, and immediately when I walked in the building I thought “I know this building, I did a painting of it.”

Your work has been characterized as “romantic”; do you agree with that?

See, I think [that] hinges on the idea of nostalgia. I don’t consider myself a romantic, but I think that there is some romanticizing possibly seen in the work. I try to–I mean I hope that these aren’t seen as really rosy optimistic images. But that kind of ties in with the whole idea of how we view this landscape. And that can kind of be seen as, “Oh well do they celebrate this construction? Do they condemn it?” I don’t think I’m taking a clear stance on that … I might be skirting the question to some degree, but I don’t really think about those things. I think one of your questions–and I may not have answered it completely–was how did I get to this point with the work … I don’t think that I ever like made a conscious decision that I was going after something.

It was just that I felt really connected with this area in my neighborhood and I spent a lot of time in it and it really hit me what I was trying to do was express landscape as some kind of documentation, document, memorial, and there was this moment that I realized that rather than paint about something else elsewhere in another time and another place that what was happening around me was just as powerful, engaging and compelling as anything else and it was part of my every day experience so there wasn’t this disconnection or as much as a disconnection.

So, what’s the difference between memorialization and documentation?

I think perhaps this might be where the romanticization comes in, because when documenting something is when you take a picture and you have the picture printed and you don’t manipulate it, you don’t modify it–boom, that’s a document. Memorializing something may be what I’m doing because I’m actually taking that picture, and I’m definitely transforming the form of it, making changes, changing the color palette. There’s a transformation that happens in imagery and the way it’s made, and so I think definitely that’s very different from documenting I mean I see they’re documents but they’re really pseudo-documents because I’m injecting a certain mood into it. So I think that’s maybe where the romanticization comes in too because I’m giving it a certain feeling. And maybe I’m not acknowledging that as a feeling but more as “This is the color palette I like” and “This is the atmosphere or the weather that’s in New York, this white light from the hazy sky and pollutants.” But you’re right, and I’m really conscious of that, and it’s not a document [and] it calls into all kind of questions as to what is actually authentic and what is a document or what has been manipulated or been modified by someone’s view or someone’s agenda.

Well, some people say there’s no such thing as objectivity.

I guess the question is what’s the truth, what aspect of it is the truth, and what aspect is transformed because I think whenever you process something through a personal filter it’s going to be no longer some objective truth but rather express some personal truth, and that’s what painting is about.

To check out some of Greg Lindquist’s prints, go to 20×200. To find out more about the artist, go to www.greglindquist.com.
Tagged as: Art, Q&A

Raquel Laneri is is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn, NY. She blogs about fashion here and miscellaneous stuff here.

Email this author | All posts by Raquel Laneri

Bonnard versus Doig

2009-03-08T10:16:00.000-07:00

Reposted from The Brooklyn Rail, March 2009

Pierre Bonnard & Peter Doig

by Greg Lindquist

Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors

Metropolitan Museum of Art: January 27 – April 19, 2009

Peter Doig: New Paintings

Gavin Brown Enterprises: January 17, 2009 – March 14, 2009

Michael Werner Gallery: January 17, 2009 – March 14, 2009

Pierre Bonnard, "The White Interior," 1932. Oil on canvas, 43 1/8 × 61 3/8 in. (109.5 × 155.8 cm). Musée de Grenoble

"Painting,” Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) once declared, is “the transcription of the adventures of the optic nerve.” He further advised, “Before you add color, you must see things once, or see them a thousand times.” Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors at the Metropolitan Museum of Art features about 80 paintings, drawings and watercolors (more than half loaned from private collections) from 1923 to 1947. That Bonnard’s exhibition follows Morandi’s retrospective (see the Rail’s November 2008 issue for full discussion) offers a coincidental comparison of each artist’s philosophy of the process of seeing: the time and immersion, constant reinvestigation and patience required for the color relationships to emerge, shift and transform.

Color for Bonnard takes on a vibrating, almost blinding and hallucinatory quality in comparison to Morandi’s quietly muted, earthen hues. Inwardly radiating color, as in “Dining Room with a Garden” (1934-35), drenches interiors with warm light, often collapsing figures into their backgrounds, creating a sense of absence through a faint presence. Delightfully, curator Dita Amory takes Bonnard’s luminous notion of color into consideration with the installation. For example, a drawing gallery is tinted with a glowing avocado, which creates a vibrating sensation in one’s peripherals when viewing “The White Interior”(1932) on flanking wall. Amory’s cohesive selection and dense installation evoke a warm intimacy that is resonant with the private informality of Bonnard’s domestic scenes.

Peter Doig, "Man Dressed as Bat," 2007. Oil on linen, 118 × 137 3/4 in.

Like Morandi’s works, Bonnard’s arrangements are commonplace subjects: he painted the rooms that he inhabited, often with exterior garden views, capturing dining room table still lifes and his wife Marthe’s everyday activities. The transformation of subject into painting is fantastical—it is a translation of memory, recreating images with an otherworldly recollection that evades sentimentality yet remains deep with feeling. The cadmium orange halo behind Marthe’s head in “Lunch” (1932) imbues a day-to-day meal with a sense of mystery and fleeting reverence. In “Work Table” (1926), Bonnard depicts a dog and a cat on a sofa. The cat’s eyes are faintly and clumsily painted, its ear murkily receding into a foggy wall. Bonnard’s painting process links multiple layers of memory to the accumulation of paint, weaving almost knitted surfaces or, as he put it, “a painting is a series of marks that join together…” Working from loose sketches and watercolors, he painted largely from memory, concerned that the painting be distinctively separate from the initial, often distracting, experience of reality. As a result, many canvases evince well-worked surfaces from his protracted efforts to color his recollections and feelings about a scene.

While there seems to be no clear legacy of Bonnard’s distinctive style, various formal aspects of his work call to mind the Abstract Expressionist painters. The composition of the watercolor and gouache in “The Bathroom” (1945) and the muted blues and pinks in a 1940 painting of the same name anticipate Richard Diebenkorn’s abstract Ocean Park series. The patchy, arid application of paint in the cadmium red tablecloth of “The Corner of the Dining Room Table” (1932) recall the thin touch of Mark Rothko’s early color field paintings.

The contemporary influence of Bonnard’s palette is also often difficult to determine. Contemporary painting, such as Daniel Richter’s acid-like color and Ryan McGinness’s recent fluorescents, often employs the look of Bonnard’s heightened chromatic combinations yet don’t necessarily use color with his intent. Rather, these colors co-opt those of CMYK commercial printing. The acerbic color in paintings by Graham Nickson and Ron Milewicz overemphasize observed atmospheric conditions, times of day and seasons, while also risking decorativeness. This suggests the question: are Bonnard’s extremely personal color sensibilities redolent of what has now become the blaring glitz, boldness and decoration characteristic of advertising? This would be a travesty, since his paintings, which so are vibrant in reproduction, when seen in the flesh, pulse with a gentle luminescence that can be achieved only through a pigment suspended in binder and applied to a substrate.

Since 1960s and ’70s-era psychedelia, experiencing Bonnard’s colors may remind some of tie-dye hues or a drug-induced trip. Painter Peter Doig, who is a guest commentator in the Met’s audio tour, discusses Bonnard’s palette by aptly distinguishing between the otherworldly and the hallucinatory: “He manages to use colors that are exaggerated, but don’t look…psychedelic. They exist within the realms of a reality that we can understand…he’s using his imagination. And he’s trying to paint things that he’s remembered or things that he can see in his head. And I think if you think about what things look like when you try to remember them, they don’t look like photographs. They don’t look like reality.”

Peter Doig also has two concurrent large-scale exhibitions hanging at Gavin Brown Enterprises downtown and Michael Werner Gallery uptown, less than a dozen blocks from the Metropolitan. And while Doig’s current work reflects his recent relocation to Trinidad and the unaccustomed imagery this has inspired, the paintings lack material presence. The canvases in these galleries are murky, thin (the surfaces almost appear stained) and compositionally flat, leaving a feeling of aesthetic (as well as geographical) estrangement from his prior brightly chromatic, lush, multilayered, dripped and splattered canvases. Doig recently commented on this shift, “I think it was just an attempt to escape mannerism…the things people liked about those paintings were the surfaces… and I wanted to break that formula. I also just wanted to explore.” This work by contrast reads often as underpaintings, lacking the material engagement of Doig’s previous efforts or of Bonnard’s Met show.

However, one element in Doig’s oeuvre remains consistent, primarily in the Gavin Brown exhibition: his penchant for the Modernist grid. In “Untitled (Ping Pong)” (2006-08) and “House of Flowers (See You There)” (2007-09), for example, Doig employs this geometric structure as a backdrop that seems more arbitrary than in previous works, such as the basketball court boundary lines in the 1999 canvas “The Heart of Old San Juan” or his early Concrete Cabin series depicting Le Corbusier’s architecture. In the Michael Werner exhibition, his self-conscious exoticizing of his subjects in the context of the environs and culture of Trinidad is more apparent. In “Man Dressed as Bat” (2007), Doig uses dulled acidic yellows, greens and purples to depict a creature that appears to be part butterfly, part human. Based on a sculpture by a Trinidad artist of a man dressed as a bat, its original source—a traditional carnival costume—is twice removed, similar to Doig’s practice of using photographic references. However, the carnival costume is neither of Doig’s time nor is it depicted in any recognizable fashion. Doig’s pointedly surreal imagery and romanticization of imagery not part of the 21^st century stands in contradistinction to Bonnard’s interiors, which were closely representative of a contemporary space in the early 20^th century.

This romanticization of exotic cultures and the Other in Doig’s work seems an obsolete throwback to Gauguin’s depiction of nude Tahitian woman. Peter Brooks discusses in Body Works how Gauguin sought to paint Tahitian woman in order to escape Western perceptions of the body, only to appear misguided, racist and ultimately suckered by the Tahitians, who were playing into his idea. Doig, less concerned with the “contemporary,” consciously adopts this time period of exiled artists in exoticism, playing at what Gaughin did two centuries earlier. In a globalized world conscious of cultural hegemonies, such works as “Man Dressed as Bat” appear more culturally manufactured product than painting.

An affinity for a dreamlike, hallucinatory, and foreign realm created by painting is what Bonnard and Doig do share. However, Doig’s work has overtly addressed the psychedelic, as in the 1993 paintings “Blotter” and “Window Pane” (referring to brands of LSD), in which he encrypts the reflections in a pond with distortions of color and pattern. In addition, splatters and drips characteristic of Doig’s earlier paintings correspond to the optical-mental experience of taking such psychoactives, something Doig describes as “like being absorbed in the landscape.” Still, it could be said that both artists employ psychedelics ideologically, as Dave Hickey defined in “Air Guitar,” disconnecting “both the signifier and signified from their purported referents in the phenomenal world—simultaneously bestowing upon us a visceral insight into the cultural mechanics of language, and a terrifying inference of the tumultuous nature that swirls beyond it.” One may also say that Doig and Bonnard similarly utilize source material for purposes of distance from the original subject or experience. Doig uses reference or found photography, whereas Bonnard worked from sketches and memory. Doig has interestingly said that a painting he has completed “may not have had hundreds of hours of work on it, but it’s had hundred of hours of being looked at,” which seems reminiscent of Bonnard’s earlier statement, perhaps an inversion of what Bonnard had meant, judging by his often overworked surfaces.

Even though both bodies of work seem to inspire an inward seeing of outward experience, an imaginative response to the visual stimuli of reality, Pierre Bonnard’s work suggests that reality in its most discrete, routine moments need only be transformed by memory, imagination and feeling into animate meditations on color. A writer I admired as a teenager once replied when I asked why he didn’t write fiction, “Why fiction? Reality is interesting enough.” What I didn’t understand was that his autobiographical narratives were fictions that expressed truths. And Bonnard, although recording his experiences from reality, painted fantastical, yet truthful fictions based on his firsthand knowledge. Peter Doig’s latest work, however, is more reliant on fictional and disconnected portrayals of cultures than individually experienced truths.

The Middle Finger Building

2009-03-08T08:25:00.000-07:00

Dustin Schuetz and Greg Lindquist after a painting session.

Panoramic Paintings

2009-03-05T06:12:00.000-08:00

THE EDGE of the Physical Landscape (And Social Fabric), oil and metallic on linen, 36 by 108"

Planner's Blight (Giving the Finger to Development) oil and metallic on linen, 36 by 108"

Amanda, who has become quite adept at applying paint without a brushstroke, painting a layer of stainless steel into the foreground of Planners Blight. These paintings have more variations of stainless steel and aluminum surfaces, creating some interesting metallic on metallic passages.

Flavorwire Post

2009-03-02T13:16:00.000-08:00

A great Flavorwire write-up by Sara Distin:

"Twice a month, Sara Distin from Jen Bekman Projects, Inc. contributes a post to Flavorwire about an artist or photographer. Jen Bekman Projects, Inc. includes Jen Bekman Gallery, 20×200 and Hey, Hot Shot!

I was not born a Brooklyn girl; it’s true, my heart will always be in the West. The seemingly endless space and sky out there are infinitely comforting, even if they’re not as vast and unchanging as I’d like to think. In Brooklyn, the skyline is crowded by warehouses abutting heavy, leaden air along the East River. Large but low slung, these buildings seem to hold up the horizon, forming a barrier between the borough and Manhattan’s more oppressive high-rises. As captured in Greg Lindquist’s metallic paintings, they defend a horizon equally comforting and foreboding.

Lindquist’s paintings of the Brooklyn waterfronts in Red Hook and Williamsburg are much like the western horizons I know and love. Muted and neutral, his paintings are records of remnants; rendered from photographs, they function much the same way photographs do, triggering memory and serving as blank placeholders for those of us who do not tie our own histories to these post-industrial spaces, but instead, landscapes elsewhere. Identities are bound to geography; we are changed too, as we alter the surfaces around us.

Lindquist makes a case for the preservation of these histories, the sanctity of the waterfronts without us is clear: while human absence is tangible, our interference is inevitable. Unlike Timothy O’Sullivan’s westward explorers, there is no turning back for us from here.

If Brooklyn is the borough you know and love, you’ll soon have the opportunity to see Lindquist’s works at BAM. His solo show, Brooklyn Industry, will be on view until April 26, with an opening night reception from 6 to 8 p.m. on Wednesday, March 11. The exhibition will feature several new works created just for BAM in addition to works that were presented in a solo exhibition titled Remembrance of Things Present, which traveled to NC State University and Bethel University last year.

Lindquist’s work may also soon appear on 20×200. Sign up for Jen Bekman’s email newsletter to be among the first to find out."

Don't Fall in Love With Buildings Screenprint in Progress

2009-02-28T08:36:00.000-08:00

Here's some process shots of Sara and Eric of Kingsland Printing doing the second screenprint collaboration. It's been a different process as I've been less involved with the steps. My talented new artist assistant Amanda has been responsible for drawing the separations, while Sara and Eric have done a meticulous printing job. Also, rather than using a coated mica particle metallic, this print uses an acrylic-borne paste from Guerra Paints . After seeing three layers this morning, I am extremely excited. The screenprint is based on the below painting and will be 13 7/8 by 38 7/8 inches on BFK Rives Paper, in an edition of 10. For more information.

Sara and Eric pulling a print.

Sara placing paper. She likes to wear hoodies a lot.

Sara inspecting the print on a drying rack. It will be cut to the edge.

Dreamboat

2009-02-27T19:03:00.000-08:00

NY Press blog post:

"Over at the brilliant art-for-the-masses site 20x200, Brooklyn-based dreamboat Greg Lindquist has two prints available from his "Brooklyn Industry" series, both of which can still be snagged for $20. Lindquist, who will be feted at BAM on Mar. 11, makes spooky paintings of industrial Brooklyn that capture the raw charm of the borough without the syrupy sentimentalism that so many have for spaces like the Williamsburg waterfront or desolate stretches of Red Hook. And, let's face it, those faux antlers hanging over your couch are woefully out of date."

I'm flattered though blushing.

Metallurgy and Minimalism

2009-02-27T18:38:00.001-08:00

Miya Ando
08.07.21.1
2008
steel, laquer, patina and pigment
24" by 24"

Today, I visited Japanese-Russian, painter-sculptor Miya Ando, whom I am considering for my "Hypothetical Landscapes" group exhibition at Janet Kurnatowski Gallery, at her DUMBO studio. Capturing metallic surfaces, I realize, is near impossible with still photography, so I decided to see the works in person. Not only is Ando a talented image-maker, she's a true metallurgist, immersing me at once in the technical information and processes involved with using a variety of steels in her work. I was impressed that she even makes her own pigments from aluminum, steel and other metal shavings. Miya Ando's paintings on steel, not only suggest Minimalist landscapes, but also are like metallic color field paintings, calling to mind Mark Rothko and Joseph Albers.

We also had some fun playing with some very strong, yet very small magnets, which seemed to stick to everything in her studio, being that in her studio nearly every surface is metal. Magnetic strips on her door holding tools literally suck up all the metal dust from the air. (A hazard?) I was amused by her series of pink colored, screw drivers, pliers, dust masks and powertools.

Avoiding Jobs, Even in Times like This

2009-02-25T23:45:00.000-08:00

Michael Borremans at David Zwirner

Met S. at the Borremans opening at Zwirner. The front gallery was darkened for a 16mm film project; the rear was dimly lit, S. told me, to mimic the lighting in the artist's studio, which made me think that the paintings weren't intened to be viewed as such. We spent some time viewing the work-- the craft and detail to each Zwirner opening is always riveting. The flatscreen televisions in the rear gallery were finished with what appeared to be a deep Cherry frame. The imagery mostly involved closely cropped portraits of figures (some mannequins) with bonnets. A bizarre throwback to 17th century Dutch portraiture.

Saw J., with whom I went to grad school and now is a full time Zwirner preparator, taking a break from installing the Philip-Lorca di Corcia show in the center gallery. S. and I venture over to visit him, see the Lisa Yuskavage show. S. recites the press walk-through, in effect giving me her own well-informed version of walk through. The installation of the di Corcia show is meticulous, painstaking work: Hundreds, maybe thousands of polaroids mounted on aluminum, resting on a ledge that winds around the perimeter walls and then inside a snail shell maze in the front. J. is slumped on the floor against the wall, eyes blood shot and glazed.

"I have to shift each one 36 to the right," he moans. "I have been here non-stop," he says, adding. I ask him a bit about the materials, how they're mounted, but I feel badly for him. He asks me if I've found any work. Luckily, I haven't had to, I explain. He relates how a lot of art handlers are out of work. It's a bad time, sure. That's why I have friends working at the Strand for less than $10 an hour. J. once had a Times style magazine feature about him being an art handler, in which his work was given exposure, although I haven't heard about it since. How can one have the time to make work on a regular basis when shows at Zwirner open monthly, causing such sleepless, tireless nights just as regularly?

I'm terrified of what taking a job would mean, compromising one's energies, giving up one's time for less than what one should be worth. IS it out of fear, insecurity, underestimating talents, determination, and ability to succeed?

As long as I can, I will avoid anything that will keep me from making my own schedule and, thus, art.

Landscape, Inside and Out

2009-02-13T10:45:00.000-08:00

Jason Bereswill painting Guanahani, 2008, Oil and inkjet on canvas, 55 x 74 inches, Courtesy Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York.

A number of recent shows expanded the possibilities of the landscape genre in painting. While some exhibitions demonstrated a more traditional relationship to observation with which landscape has been often associated, others showed a departure from a straightforward mode of documentation, generating landscape paintings that are imagined and performed.

Exhibitions Under Review

Andrew Lenaghan: Recent Paintings of Maine at George Adams Gallery
October 23- Dec 27, 2008

Ron Milewicz at Elizabeth Harris Gallery
November 13- December 20, 2008

Ali Banisadr: Paintings at Leslie Tonkonow Artwork + Projects
October 30 - December 20, 2008

Jason Bereswill: In House - In Process
at Tony Shafrazi Gallery
November 11, 2008 - January 24, 2009

Andrew Lenaghan
Near Witch Hole Pond
2008
oil on panel
13 x 22 1/2 inches
Courtesy George Adams Gallery

Lenaghan’s exhibition, espousing a traditional relationship to observation, freezes seemingly timeless, unaltered landscapes of Maine. Consisting of paintings executed en plein air during a residency provided by Richard Estes, Lenaghan’s work is straightforward and documentary, ensnaring a stillness and serenity in these natural scenes.

Andrew Lenaghan
Monument Cove
2008
oil on panel
24 x 13 1/4 inches

Neil Welliver’s paintings, many of which similarly capture reflections of rotting wood, come to mind. These works also show a glimpse into an unspoiled American landscape that recalls the Hudson River School’s vistas. Lenaghan also evokes Fairfield Porter’s landscapes of Maine, but Lenaghan’s brushwork is tighter and more descriptive, pointing towards an Estes brand of verisimilitude.

Ron Milewicz, Water Tower, Spring (afternoon), 2008 , oil on linen  26 x 42, Courtesy Elizabeth Harris Gallery

Stablemate Ron Milewicz’s exhibition of urban landscapes largely depicts water towers from interior views. Like Lenaghan, Milewicz chooses to work exclusively from life. However, Milewicz’s palette is jarringly, and perhaps contradictorily, synthetic and, to some degree, imagined. His acerbic colors overemphasize observed atmospheric conditions, times of day and seasons, as this painting gives the impression of a cool spring afternoon.

Ron Milewicz, Water Tower, Summer (morning), 2008 , oil on linen, 26 x 42 inches, Courtesy Elizabeth Harris Gallery

A departure from earlier panoramic formats, in many paintings, Milewicz presents a Morandi-centric view of landscape, as if the water towers are bottles in a still life, surrogates for human forms and presence. Several sets of paintings in this show capture the same scene at different times of day and season, offering subtle shits of detail and coloration to provide radical optical sensations and moods.

Ron Milewicz, Family from the Sky, 2008 oil on linen 78 x 84 inches, Courtesy Elizabeth Harris Gallery.

This exhibition showcases a number of Milewicz’s largest works. Family from the Sky also encapsulates his use of complimentary colors, which although often brings one closer to the sensation of a particular reality in the landscape, also flirts with decorative color combinations.

Ali Banisadr
Amen, Oil on linen
49-3/4 x 66-1/8 inches, 2008
Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York

Unlike Lenaghan and Milewicz, Ali Banisadr creates imagined landscapes of heavily layered oils. Rather than relying on examination of the external world, Banisadr turns to his internal world of memory, recollecting his childhood in Tehran, where he experienced the bombings of the Iran-Iraq war. His agitated yet viscous brushstrokes reflect instability, disorder and panic running throughout the work.

Ali Banisadr
Detail Amen, Oil on linen
49-3/4 x 66-1/8 inches 2008
Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York

Banisadr’s all-over compositions are populated by distinctive, distant figures reminiscent of those found Hieronymous Bosch’s landscapes, but they are rendered in violent Abstract Expressionist slashes and gestures that, when viewed up close, dissolve into lushly abstracted, layered surfaces and anonymous shapes. Their relationship to the technology of a digital projector comes to mind: when viewing the projection up close, the image similarly dissolves into individual blocks of pixels.

Ali Banisadr
Prisoners of the Sun (TV), Oil on linen
54 x 72 inches, 2008
Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York

The memories Banisadr culls are reconciled with intensely historical and personal imageries, which refer anywhere from Persian miniatures to television test patterns. These cryptic horizontal stripes for Banisadr tap into his recollections of the bombings—during this event, they blankly appeared on television screens. However, these test patterns for an American viewer may arouse a nostalgia for a bygone television era, for as programming has become 24-hours, these screens are have become obsolete.

Installation view of "Jason Bereswill, In House - In Process" Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York.

Although Berewill’s exhibition includes a number of plein aire studies, his exhibition emphasizes landscape painting as performance and spectacle. For the duration of the show, Bereswill will paint tropical views of St.Barts in the Caribbean inside the gallery, completing in-process oils over photographic inkjet prints on canvas. Making the private act of painting a public display, Bereswill demystifies its often-perceived magical and elusive process. Transforming the gallery into a studio, his set-up includes a computer on rolling cart, laserjet printed reference images, and books open to reproductions of landscape paintings by Courbet, Richter, Cezanne and Van Gogh.

Jason Bereswill, 8/07/08 11:30 am, 2008, Oil on linen, 18 x 21 inches, Courtesy Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York.

In many cases, the paintings in process correspond to on-site studies done on the island of St.Barts in the Caribbean. These smaller, looser paintings are used as references to atmosphere and color for Bereswill to complete the larger paintings. In process, these paintings, of varying amounts of ink-jet print and pigment, comment on their method of production, rather than the object itself. Like Thomas Kinkade’s work, which creates a pricing system that adds hierarchical value to how much an image is “touched” with paint by the hand of the artist, Bereswill is adding value to his work by performing its making.

Jason Bereswill, Ans de Cayes, 2008, Oil and inkjet on canvas, 55 x 81 inches, Courtesy Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York.

Also, by relinquishing privacy, which forces interaction with gallery visitors and identifies himself as the artist (how often can an artist anonymously stand in his or her gallery and overhear onlooker’s comments?), Bereswill’s gallery-as-stage resembles the contained environment of reality television shows, such as MTV Real World. In these situations, pressures are created on the observed, often inspiring unusual actions and reactions. Although it may be nothing as melodramatic as a reality television affray, one might wonder how being on display may affect Bereswill’s production. So far, this may suggest one explanation when one watches him playfully wipe his dirty brushes on the walls and place books out for his benefit as much as the visitor’s.

MTV Real World: Brooklyn Wrap Party

2008-12-05T10:18:00.001-08:00

It turns out that the building appearing in the this painting was where the Real World house was located.

Don't Fall in Love

2008-11-21T10:37:00.001-08:00

Don't Fall in Love with Buildings, They'll Break Your Heart, Oil and Metallic on Linen, 17.5 by 50 inches, 2008, Private Collection

This painting was finished last Friday and promptly purchased Saturday by an Italian diplomat and his wife, who are relocating in Brazil next month.

The title derives from a graffiti stencil I spotted on the northside of Williamsburg, close to the construction site depicted in this painting (carefully study image below, thanks Nekst, for obscuring it). I also discuss it here in this interview earlier this year.

Wall Painting for Remembrance of Things Present Exhibition

2008-11-06T15:56:00.000-08:00

2 PM: After catching a 7 am flight, I arrive at the gallery after doing some supply shopping with director Michelle Westmark. The wall is rotated inwards so that we can have room to work. We intially have some problem making the first layer level as the floors and partition are both either uneven or warped.

A base coat of grey acrylic is applied and then metallic silver.

4:30 pm. I'm joined by Caylon, Beth and Kristin, who enthusiastically help tape off the sky layer. These layers are based on separations from a screenprint that's about 7 by 19 inches. The wall is about 14 feet wide and the image is about 9 feet wide, making it a major translation in scale.

6 pm. Kyle joins Caylon, little do they know they're in it for the long haul.

7 pm. Remove tape. The whole process is projecting layer by layer, using painters tape to make a stencil by cutting out the painted areas. It's an extremely meticulous activity.

9 pm. Fast forward to last layer. Michelle rejoins us. Did two quick layers of greys.

Kyle and Caylon are still going strong.

Kyle: "Do you think you can just freehand the last layer? You know, it would save some time."

Detail of Caylon cutting tape that has been outlined with Sharpie. We break around 10 pm for Thai food from the neighboring restaurant. Caylon and Kyle stay until about 11:30 pm.

1:30 am: Michelle thinking we can get it done. I'm operating on waking up at 6 am the same day, and a two hour time deficit: one hour from time zone and one from recent daylight savings change. (Notice the miniature screenprint hanging next to its gargantuan counterpart).

1:45 am. Ok, well at least I'll do the orange traffic cone, my favorite detail.

5 pm next day. After critiques on campus, we return to gallery to add vinyl lettering and finishing touches.

Caylon touching up black layer.

Around 6 pm. Done. I realize at 3.5 by 9 feet, it's the biggest painting I've ever made.

The Rosebuds Make Good Neighbors and Friends

2008-10-26T16:44:00.000-07:00

The ROSEBUDS at the Bellhouse in Brooklyn, October 24, 2008; from left to right: Ivan Howard, Kelly Crisp and Thomas Costello.

Music seems more meaningful when you feel a personal connection to it. Whether by style or content, there always seems to be something that draws you and makes you feel like an active participant. It's not quite voyeuristic, but often feels like it. And it has an intimate role as it becomes the soundtrack of your life: on your ipod, helping pass the time working, giving you a rhythm which to dance, something to drown out the noisy lovemaking you don't want your neighbors or landlady to hear.

I went through a period of concert-going last spring during an intense relationship, but, like the relationship, my interests in concerts didn't stick. But lately, I've enjoyed concert-going again from a different perspective. No longer concert as date, but rather concert as behind-the-scenes hang outs with friends.

Painter and friend Harrison Haynes, for example, plays with Les Savy Fav, who performed at the Williamsburg Music Hall recently. It was really fun to watch Tim Harrington, their eccentric and ingenious frontman, practice his latest inventive antics in front of dressing room mirror. His costume of choice included bells, a tye-dyed short, moppy wig, Elvis glasses and a frilled leather jacket, not unlike the one the lead singer from The Counting Crows wore in the "Mr. Jones" video. It was pretty hillarious in the dressing room, I tried not laugh. About as funny as hearing the band rehearse in the bathroom, Harrison playing the drums on what sounded like his thighs.

Friday night I received a text from my new neighbor (literally next door) Kelly Crisp, singer and co-proprietor of The Rosebuds, who were playing their first of two consecutive shows in New York at the Bellhouse. "Hey, you're on the list. Are you coming? Thomas is here." Kelly was referring to Thomas Costello, a good friend and musician (Mount Weather frontman) from Chapel Hill, NC, with whom I used to play in a band called Snake Castle.

One thing that Thomas I have in common as creative people is a general expectation for people to plan around and adapt to our whims, lack of communication and general disorganized, spontaneous nature. I have by now accepted that almost all conversations I have with Thomas are in real time. We rarely talk on the phone and have exchanged probably a dozen emails in the six years we have been friends.

So, after a quick phone call to Kelly to confirm details, I had dropped plans to paint in studio and took off to the Gowanus area of Brooklyn to join the Rosebuds for a night out. Thomas and I had a quick drink at the bar before watching Wye Oak and Crystal Stilts play before The Rosebuds went on. Like old times, Thomas and I spent a great deal of time critiquing performances, comparing creative aspects of making music and art, and drank a lot of free beer backstage.

Wye Oak at the Bellhouse in Brooklyn, October 24, 2008; from left to right: Andy Stack and Jenn Wasner.

Wye Oak were particularly good. Recalling Cat Power, a Nirvana In Utero-era sense of dropped D distortion (yeah I know that album probably wasn't recorded in dropped D), Ida and Rainer Maria, they were incredible multi-tasking performers. Andy Stack, the drummer, simultaneously played bass guitar-ish keys with one hand, drums with the other and contributing backing vocals. Their latest record, released on Merge, is good, too, yet Jenn Wasner explained to me later that it was never meant to gain the audience it has. Jenn is 22, was studying Japanese literature in Baltimore, when she dropped out of school to tour Europe with Dr. Dogg.

Snake Castle t-shirt, c. 2004, Courtesy of John Hutchens

Mostly, before performing there's a lot of waiting around. I met Logan, The Rosebuds drummer for the upcoming tour, and we formed an impromtu drumming circle using various Thai takeout containers, chopsticks and beer bottles. Before going on stage, I convinced Thomas to wear my Snake Castle t-shirt, so we traded t-shirts as Mac McCaughan (Merge label owner, Superchunk, Portastatic) walks up. Ivan asks me if I want to sing during the song "Nice Fox," to which I say "Sure, definitely." And then I nervously scurry to bathroom to listen to it off my phone to make sure I have the chorus right. It's really easy, Thomas reassures me. But I'm kind of a perfectionist too.

The Rosebuds are phenomenal performers and it's been duly noted. Enveloping melacholic love songs in dancable sing-alongs that invite crowd participation, they have a contagious charm. Thomas's bass playing added more density to their sound; playing sometimes as a three-piece doesn't do enough justice to the albums' layered production. And my favorite moment was a bass-runs-synched-with-drums bridge during "Boxcar." I reprised an ambition of earlier years as "band photographer and cinematographer," but quickly lost interest as I felt detached from the moment. During the end of the set, for "Nice Fox"members of other bands were called onto stage. "Come on, Greg Lindquist, get up here," Thomas announced and I obliged.

We huddled around the mic, staring out into a nightblinded audience (I couldn't see past the first row of the crowd). Singing the refrain "And it don't mean nothing at all" (Fourteen and a half times, to be exact), I thought about the overemphasis of a simple Existentialist concept: Nothing means anything. Anything means nothing. But in this line along, I began to think about how it embodied the strength of Ivan's songwriting. Taking complex, often tragic and macabre, feelings, observations and situations, Ivan transforms them into often Southern dialect-tinged, simple Pop refrains and hooks. I thought also, "Wouldn't it also be easier to simply sing 'And it doesn't matter at all'?" But not only does the latter not sound as good but it also doesn't capture the personal voice of the former.

One of the things that has always amazed me is the disparity between Ivan's speaking and singing voice. I've known of The Rosebuds as a band for more years than as people, but have always heard a Morrissey (a la Birds Make Good Neighbors) and Paul McCartney (a la The Rosebuds Make Out) British accent influence in Ivan's singing. But in getting to know Ivan as a person, I recognized the southern accent characteristic of rural North Carolina, which is an amusing juxtaposition. When a guy in another band brought it up after their second performance, Ivan replied that the dialect of NC's Outer Banks (being geographically isolated) is more closely related to Elizabethan British English than other regions of the United States. Interesting also, if Ivan sings like the Beatles, then it's Ivan singing the Beatles singing Chuck Berry.

Music is even more meaningful when your friends are the people performing on stage. It breaks down the separation between performer and audience, makes you feel you're there with them singing. And its even better if you are on stage, too. The Rosebuds encourage this kind of relationship with their music, encouraging friendly inclusivity and audience participation, constantly making good neighbors and even better friends.

The ROSEBUDS at the Bellhouse in Brooklyn, October 24, 2008; from left to right: Ivan Howard, Kelly Crisp, members of Crystal Stilts, Thomas Costello and Greg Lindquist.

Contamination and Control

2008-10-24T15:37:00.000-07:00

Janet Kurnatowski, epoxy, plaster and motor oil, dimensions variable, 2008

The 21st century landscape has become largely unnatural. The optimism of the Industrial Revolution has been replaced by a dread of its ruinous consequence for the environment and our health. No locale better embodies the visible reminders of this by-gone era with its waste processing plants, gasoline-storage facilities and abandoned refineries than Brooklyn’s waterfront and surrounding post-industrial landscape. However, what is not visible in this landscape and lies beneath its surface represents these concerns with more exigency and impending hazard than the empty architectural shells of their sources.

In 1919, twenty acres of the Standard Oil refinery storing 110 million gallons of oil exploded near Newtown Creek, a three and a half mile estuary on the Brooklyn-Queens border. An estimated 50 million gallons seeped into the creek and the underground water table, becoming the largest oil spill in history. Not until the late 1970s were there any clean up efforts made, estimating 17 – 30 million gallons remains, across a 55 acre plot, up to 25 feet thick.

Standard Oil, now Exxon Mobile, made a discrete agreement for clean up with the state that was not formalized until 1990. In the last five years, as Brooklyn’s real estate values have soared, a renewed interest in the spill’s resolution has produced new investigations that have found carcinogens such as benzene vapors in the basement of buildings. Janet Kurnatowski’s family has inhabited the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn for almost four decades. Both of her remaining family members in this area have been diagnosed with cancer whose causes are likely linked to the oil spill.

Kurnatowski’s work seeks to create awareness of this environmental disaster through a highly aestheticized and austere formal vocabulary. Conceptually driven, her work is also materially engaging. Pouring onto an acetate sheet a non-toxic resin used for enameling jewelry, Kurnatowski creates highly controlled spills by tilting the acetate sheet and using brushes. The result is a glossy, highly reflective surface resembling a cartoon caricatured puddle of oil. Kurnatowski then injects plaster into balloons and squeezing the intestine-like encasing while it sets, creates anthropomorphic forms. Engaging the viewer’s sense of smell, she soaks these sculptures in used motor oil and arranges them in communal clusters on top and outside of spills, activating installations on the floor and the wall.

The sculptures’ largely pristine forms ironically contrast the murky impurity associated with pollution. The black Pollockesque spills and pale plaster figurines, which recall the sculpture of Brancusi, Noguchi and Jean Arp, denote Kurnatowski’s ideals of beauty. Creating an unspoiled makeover for this contaminated subject also calls to mind her interest in cosmetology. Most importantly, though, Kurnatowski is an ideal commentator for this environmental disaster: Both a descendant of Greenpoint’s Polish community and a member of the young creative class that has steadily gentrified its environs for the past decade, she understands the immediate and remote environmental, social and political issues. While at present the value of real estate seems to cloud the long-term risks to human health and the environment, creating awareness of these imminently fatal toxicities will lead to action and hopefully a full decontamination and clean up.

theanybabywhatever

2008-10-24T11:18:00.000-07:00

Liam Gillick, theanyspacewhatever signage system (prototype), 2008. Aluminum. Installation view, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2008.

Last night was the opening for theanyspacewhatever exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum. Perhaps more interesting than the actual exhibition was the newly renovated facade of the building, which has been covered by scaffolding for the past year or so. This new exhibition features a group of artists who have "eschewed the individual object in favor of the exhibition environment as a dynamic arena, ever expanding its physical and temporal parameters." How does this curatorial statement translate physically to an exhibition? I'd place emphasis on the whatever segment of the exhibition's title. Vague and provocative vinyl lettering loosely resembling refridgerator magnet poetry, repetitive video footage, an Illy coffee bar and bean bag chairs all are part of these artists' conception of this site-specific installation. The Guggenheim is a great space and apparently 80% of its visitors come for the architecture anyway.

I attended the opening with my friends Kirsten and Erika. Beginning at the sixth floor, we worked our way down the windy ramp floors. At the top floor, under a segment of vinyl letting empasizing the corner of a bay, a baby stroller was parked. We looked inside to find a motionless baby, deciding it was a doll, perhaps a send-up to Duane Hanson (or Ron Mueck?), but at any rate a part of the exhibition. After five to ten minutes, a woman walked up and pushed the stroller away. We all were confused: was this part of the exhibition? A performance piece? We watched as the woman appeared to be laughing as people approached the stroller. Erika, a tour guide at the Guggenheim, began brainstorming about ways to incorporate this stroller into her next tour.

We make our way back to the reception area. Kirsten and I run into the stroller again, unattended. She's staring intently at the baby and then grabs my arm, exclaiming, "It moved!" I can't believe her, joking that it's animatronic, so I look on as we wait for any more fidgeting. A few second later, both hands twitch in unison. "Whoah," we move closer, utterly confused as I just had moments before proposed taking the stroller and wheeling it across the crowd just to be weird and artsy. The woman we recognize from upstairs reappears, sees our stares and says, "It's real-- it's a girl!" She then proceeds to wheel the baby through the crowd and out the door.

Giorgio Morandi's Legacy to Contemporary Painting

2008-10-22T18:58:00.000-07:00

Giorgio Morandi (Italian, 1890–1964)
Still Life (Natura morta), 1943
Oil on canvas; 11 7/8 x 17 3/4 in. (30 x 45 cm)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon 2006.128.29
© 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE Rome

Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) is best known as a painter of modest-sized still lifes, depicting earthen-hued bottles, boxes, vases, jugs and cups. The first large-scale Morandi retrospective in the United States, currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, consists of nearly a hundred still lifes and a dozen landscapes (out of the 1,700 paintings he made over his lifetime).

Tucked away in the underground galleries of the Robert Lehman wing, where the space’s circular layout confuses the exhibition’s chronology and variously colored walls present Morandi’s palette inaccurately, the installation is a disappointment despite the welcome attention the show brings to his early influences and to some of his more anomalous works. In contrast, the Lucas Schoormans Gallery in Chelsea opened a Morandi exhibition concurrent to the Metropolitan’s retrospective, consisting of six characteristic still life paintings from 1945 to 1958. Schoormans gives you the Morandi you would expect. Sparely installed on slightly tinted, cool gray walls, these paintings glow in a way that the works in the Met’s lower level do not. With more room to breathe, they also remind one of the time and immersion required to absorb the paintings’ subtle undulations of value, chroma and touch, leaving you wanting to return to the Metropolitan, with its sheer volume and relative variety, for more.

This is all to say that to fully experience Morandi’s paintings requires constant investigation and revisitation. Shifting contexts continually connect and disconnect great art with current social issues and historical events. These exhibitions, installed in a contemporary gallery and a museum wing that had previously featured Fra Angelico, demonstrate at present the diverse contexts and levels of meaning applicable to his work.

Morandi took refuge in an intense inner world. In painting, he found the animate spark in inanimate objects. Perhaps his reclusiveness echoed a desire to retreat from an Italy ravaged by two successive world wars. Whether conjuring the corporeal process of aging or the deterioration of architecture under the elements, Morandi’s extremely personal vision of painting is noticeably contemporary, with his bleak hues and worn forms suggesting desolation and decay. His crumbly still lifes quietly evoke our twin fears of economic collapse and environmental destruction.

From his contemporaries to the present, Morandi has been a major influence and inspiration for painters and painting. While viewing the exhibition, I thought about how the fissured forms and subdued light of a 1925 self-portrait as well as his later landscapes recall Fairfield Porter, who perceptively wrote that Morandi’s still lifes “differ from one another like the cases in the declension of a Latin noun.” In the late 1940s, as Morandi’s brushstroke became washier, freer and more pronounced, I thought about the sense of touch in Philip Guston’s late figurative work. Interestingly, Guston’s blunt cartoon shapes depicted surreal images of isolation and alienation—forlorn shoes, bricks, and bottles, sometimes gazed upon by giant, one-eyed figures—that replaced the post-war abstractions that made his career. Guston’s late figuration chronicles a more direct response to the unstable world around him, while he paradoxically retreated from the New York art scene.

Luc Tuymans
Demolition
2005
Oil on canvas
Image Size: 64.96 x 44.49 x 1.57 inches 165 x 113 x 4 cm

Demolition, a 2005 canvas by Luc Tuymans, repeatedly comes to mind when thinking of Morandi’s legacy for contemporary painting. Unlike many young painters who are fixated only on the perceived cultural currency and sufficient (often mechanical) reproducibility of an image, Tuymans gives equal weight to painting as both image and materially engaged object. At once an amorphous smoke cloud and cerebral gray matter, the luminous assortment of pale purplish grays of Demolition flicker in unison with Tuymans’ thin and diverse sense of touch: the movement of Tuymans’ hand as he drags the brush across the canvas is vividly recorded by the materiality of paint. Nearly abstracted beyond recognition, the painting has only one detail identifying its imagery as a cloud of smoke and not cranial tissue—a small segment of a streetlamp.

In our current climate, Demolition inevitably evokes the dust, debris and devastation of September 11th. Whether the actual scene is simply a construction site doesn’t matter, for it’s the contemporary consciousness we bring to these images that makes their meaning. It’s our internal projection of a cultural context onto the external reality of painting. For Tuymans, the way it’s painted is just as important as what it says. He transforms common imagery into abstractions, often without losing the original source (and when he does, he slyly use titles to reestablish its relationship to external elements).

The transformative quality in Morandi’s painting is decisively the result of his wavering, almost trembling, brushwork. His bottles and boxes become anthropomorphic, surrogates for human presence. They lose a tangible solidity and form, suggesting an immaterial buoyancy. Morandi was rarely interested in a measurable verisimilitude or faithful observation. These articles of inspiration become little more than springboards for painting; what is most important in viewing his work is attuning one’s eye to the intricacies, nuances and inventiveness of his painterly delivery.

Chuck Close once said, “I personally couldn't care less about a bunch of bottles—but I am sure glad Morandi could.” Close’s statement is curiously provoking. He seems to be saying either that Morandi’s passion for his subject is the reason his paintings work, or that his passion for painting evoked a mesmerizing wonder over his subject’s physical structure.

Still, it’s never clear whether Morandi fetishized bottles or was simply using what was at hand. As the retrospective demonstrates, he experimented in his early years with metaphysical painting in a style more akin to de Chirco’s. Although he ultimately detached himself from association with any defined movements of his peers, it is worth noting the philosophical importance that metaphysical art endowed upon common objects. In light of this, the bottles in Morandi’s later still lifes could be viewed as obtuse signifiers of the two world wars with seashells as stand-ins for artillery casings. I find it fascinating that we cannot avoid these associations, which serve to connect his historical context to ours. But the lack of evidence of a conceptual or semantic intention in Morandi’s paintings is not only what distinguishes him from a contemporary painter such as Tuymans, but it is also what makes him often so inaccessible and misunderstood.

An epiphany about Morandi’s work occurred when I was in the Museo Morandi in Bologna, where I was astonished to see the actual still life objects on display alongside his paintings. The items themselves, made of glass, cardboard or clay, sometimes with gesso or oils by the artist, had little significance beyond artifacts. What really riveted me, though, was how the sight of these anonymous, nondescript objects intensified my appreciation of how the oftentimes awkward, uncontrolled movements of a brush crafted these paintings. The sense of touch, invention, and originality conveyed by nothing but a brush and a distinctively subtly grayed palette filled them with undeniable breath and life.

This quality is above all is what keeps Morandi’s work essential to our times. Decay is always with us: the tumbledown architecture implied by Morandi’s bottles suggest the ruins of classical Rome just as easily as its bombing during World War II. The timelessness of these paintings derives from their material engagement, which outlives the decay and collapse of their creator’s times and escapes often narrowly categorized imagery.

Writing and painting

2008-10-14T14:05:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me today: while writing about art is a process of assigning words to a sensation or feeling often evoked by art, making art is somewhat a process of the opposite-- starting with an idea or description thereof and then translating it into a visual sensation or feeling.

Art in America Review Out in October 2008 Issue

2008-10-09T12:58:00.000-07:00

Stephen Westfall did a superb job comparing and contrasting my work to Rackstraw Downes, a contemporary landscape painter, 40 years to my senior. I rewatched Children of Men after reading the review and was disturbed by how likely such a dystopia seems now amid our country's worsening economic crisis. "Lindquist's melancholy marks him as a Romantic," Westfall says. There, Thomas and David-- it's officially settled: they're sad paintings.

Read review in full screen.

New Writing Posted "Notes from NC"

2008-10-09T12:48:00.000-07:00

Mike Cindric and Vincent Petrarcha, Art as Shelter

installed at the NC Museum of Art Museum Park, Raleigh, NC

A new piece about the NC art scene posted on artcritical.com, summarizing my experience reaquainting myself with the Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill area. I'm amazed how quickly the cities are growing into one another; before long the triangle area will be a whole. How could I not begin the piece with a salient quote about nostalgia as described by Milan Kundera, after all of his novels that my good friend John and I read one summer when I lived in NC?

Read here.