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'Slough'
The official greeter for this delightful, sprawling show, curated by artist Steve DiBenedetto, was Fabian Marcaccio's construction of a head vomiting flowers (2008-9). It vividly introduced the primary conceit behind the more than 40 works in this show: out of rot springs life; out of old art comes new.
The flowers and decomposition motif pervades Dieter Roth's fascinating collage Schlecht Erkennbares Blumen Still-Leben (Barely Recognizable Flowers Sill Life, 1977/79), which both recalls the artist's garbage assemblages and parodies the old-fashioned still-life tradition. To the life of the Roth were two Warhol "piss paintings," which explicitly link excretion to artistic creation. Meanwhile on the back wall was Malcolm Morley's huge painting The Theory of Catastrophe (2004), featuring a monstrous traffic smashup. With Morley the theme drifted from natural decay to man-made destruction.
The show sounds unbearably solemn, but in fact it was so varied and, at the same time, so conceptually unified that it came together as a fascinating exploration of the creative process, played out in painting, video, assemblage, photography, and sculpture. Hermann Nitsch's large painting dominated by a menacing red blot might have skewed things toward violence, but Markus Lüpertz's Landschaft Schwarz (Black Landscape, 1998) looks back to an almost Gothic juxtaposition of nature and brooding darkness. Vito Acconci's four photographs documenting Seedbed (1972), a performance in which the artist masturbated under a ramp at Sonnabend Gallery, could be viewed as a portrayal of the site of an obscene event that would become a cleansed space where life could begin again.
This was not a summer show of miscellaneous pieces but a meticulously staged demonstration of an idea. The mix of artists—living, dead, young, old—enacted the vitality of the compost heap, of the grave festooned with blooming lilacs.
—Alfred Mac Adam
"Slough" - a swamp, a marsh, despair, the act of shedding, an infamous English town; pronounced sluff, slew, slow - is the title and tenor of painter Steve DiBenedetto's curatorial undertaking at the David Nolan Gallery, and, curiously, the show is faithful to the word.
Sitting in the gallery window, Keith Edmier's Cycas Apotropaica (2009) is a primordial welcome to the depths of "Slough." The cycas tree is Edmier's first living work (his plant works, usually cast in a man-made material, are meditations on natural forms entangled with human interactions and interpretations). Inside, hodge-podge and happenstance come together, the gallery a breeding ground for castoffs, residual materials, layering, and encrustation. A provocateur in all mediums, Dieter Roth is represented by Shlecht Erkennbares Blumen Still-Leben (1977-79), an energetic assembly of graphite and cardboard bits and bobs, which stick out from within its edges. A signature Dan Colen work, made of chewing gum and its residue, is whispery and delicate in application. Andy Warhol's amorphous rust orange "Piss" paintings (1978) - urine and gesso on canvas - are predecessors to Colen's work, and, appropriately, two examples from the Warhol series are placed beside it. Philip Taafe's marbled works on paper Slough I and Slough IV (2003) are in a state of both becoming and degenerating, recalling lava or melting ice cream. And Fabian Marcaccio's gurgling pair of sculptures This just out paintant (2008-09), disgorge their innards - pigmented inks, alkyd paints, and silicone gels - into midair. But Michelle Segre's orificial Untitled (2009) formation - constructed of papier-mache, metal, beeswax, acrylic, and oil - turns this swamp into a vivacious wetland. The sponge-like, bright-hued organism is the new birth growing within the gloriously mucky environment. Alexander Ross, Joe Bradley, Jessica Craig-Martin, Carroll Dunham, Frank Stella, Jon Kessler, Larry Poons, and Cheryl Donegan, among others, also take part in this Chelsea slough.
"SLOUGH"
The title "Abiogenesis" might have been too portentous for summer, but art emerging from primordial ooze is the drift of this rambunctious show of works by thirty-four artists (from bigwigs like Andy Warhol to young guns like Pat McElnea), organized by the painter Steve DiBenedetto. Margins trump centers. One high point, while technically in the show, is outside it: Keith Edmier's window installation of a living cycad plant sprouting from a slab of hardened lava. As you enter, the tarnished glamour of a small silver painting by Cheryl Donegan sets a louche tone that gives way to debauchery in Fabian Marcaccio's aggressively repellent polychrome homage to vomit. Through July 24. (Nolan, 527 W. 29th St. 212-925-6190.)
Critic's Pick
MESSY VITALITY
The group show "Slough," seemingly inspired by the texture of a loofah, features dozens of artists who skate among sincerity, irony, conceptualism, and earnest abstraction. You'll see photos of Vito Acconci masturbating under a gallery floor, Cheryl Donegan's silver painting scraped with a box cutter, Dieter Roth's still lifes (pictured), and Keith Edmier's cycad growing in the gallery window. Holding the hodgepodge together is a wily concern with the way that material accumulates at the edges of preformed activities and the varieties of human touch. A fine mess (at David Nolan, through June 27). – Jerry Saltz
GUEST BLOG: By Thomas Micchelli, The Brooklyn Rail
In his New York Times article on the opening of the Venice Biennale, Michael Kimmelman laments that the look of the exhibition "suggests a somewhat dull, deflated contemporary art world, professionalized to a fault, in search of a fresh consensus."
Without reading too much into it, the critique that contemporary art has been "professionalized to a fault" feels analogous to the sentiment expressed by the anonymous graffito I mentioned in my previous post: "The only true artists are amateurs."
Of course, the word "amateur" cuts both ways. In most contexts it connotes a lack of training, sophistication, or seriousness, but its derivation from the Latin amator implies that its foremost meaning is "lover." Simply put, the amateur is someone who, motivated only by the love of the game, engages in an activity without expecting anything to come of it.
Two exhibitions that I encountered yesterday, Slough at David Nolan New York and Alice Neel: Selected Works at David Zwirner, brought this concept into focus in very different ways.
Slough, astutely curated by the artist Steve DiBenedetto, is a group show with a complicated backstory based on the title word's multiple meanings. As explained in the press release, the range includes "bog-like" and "primordial," "moral degradation or spiritual dejection," "cast aside or shed off," and "the accumulation of dust on the rim of a fan, snow on the edge of a shovel, or trash in the breakdown lane of a highway."
The show includes striking works by Dieter Roth, Jon Kessler, Robert Bordo, and Michael Scott, who represent quite a heterogeneity of aesthetic objectives and studio practice, but who are nonetheless united by a sense of improvisation, accident, and play: a what-if approach akin to kicking over a can of paint to see what happens next (which, in fact, is what Hermann Nitsch's untitled canvas seems to be). Philip Taaffe's swirls of pigment, titled Slough I and Slough IV (both 2003), and Andy Warhol's invariably lovely Piss Paintings from 1978 adopt pure serendipity as their method and meaning; densely laden works by Larry Poons and the late Eugène Leroy revel in their raw materiality; Carroll Dunham's surprisingly aggressive Untitled (1984-85), in graphite, ink and paint on wood veneer, bespeaks a jittery call-and-response that, like most of the strongest works in the show, seems to spring from an ethos of risk-taking oblivious to the ultimate salvageability of the results. Nothing is calculated, preconceived, strategized, theorized, or prejudged. The object comes into existence solely to delight its maker or, as it seems with Dan Colen's chewing gum pictures, for the sheer giddy hell of it.
One Sunday last month I was sitting in Sara Delano Roosevelt Park in the heart of New York City's Chinatown. A small ensemble of musicians were playing traditional instruments while neighborhood residents crowded the benches or milled about. An old man found the musicians' wireless microphone and sang an apparently unsolicited solo. The tunes came one after another. No one clapped or even paid the instrumentalists much mind; for their part, the players seemed indifferent to whether anyone was listening or not. They were most likely amateurs, yet their musicianship was top-flight. The way the neighbors seemed to take them for granted, however, did not strike me as rude or condescending; instead, it evidenced how culture, rather than standing apart from the community, is woven into its fabric.
This is how I see the pictures of Alice Neel. Her paintings of lovers and friends seem part of a daily conversation, a record of who dropped by that day and had the time to sit. This feels especially true of the works in the first room of the David Zwirner exhibition, and of the nudes in a related show uptown at Zwirner & Wirth, all of which were done in the 1930s and 1940s. Neel was working in
near-total professional obscurity, but this circumstance never diminished her drive to infuse these images with a solidity of form and a magnificence of color that bears comparison to the titans of
European modernism. Her expectations for her work might have been humble, but not her aesthetic ambition, which she fulfilled through a searching eye, a sculptural line, and a savage palette. Her art was not her career, but her life. How many of us wouldn't wish that for ourselves?