Edward Kienholtz installing his sculpture of a motorcycle cop beating a black man, with the man's suitcase popped open and his personal possessions there for the viewer to see.

William Claxton's photography of Ed Kienholz's Ferus gallery opening 1962. Kienholz was untrained as an artist. Before devoting himself to art full time, he worked as a carpenter, and in a psychiatric ward among other odd jobs.

Edward-Kienholz-The-Pool-Hall (1993) This work depicts in brutal raw detail the male fantasy of the nearly nude female being the toy of men. She is headless. The men are black and white and have antlers as if they are stags. This then is a Stag Party.

The Pool Hall is orchestrated as a Period Piece of Americana

Edward Kienholz's The Birthday (1964) This work evokes both the terror and majestic forces at work when a woman is giving birth. It as if bolts of life energy are being thrust from her body. It happens in a plain and simple space, on a Kienholtz signature black and white checkerboard floor.

Edward Kienholz's Five Car Stud catalog

Recently I visited LACMA to see Edward Kienholz's Five Car Stud. It is comprised of five mid-20th century vehicles, and depicts the nightmare castration of a black man who has been caught having sex with a white woman in a truck. The installation is most remarkable. The cars are real. The sculptures are made from Kienholz's friends body casts. The Negro is a giant; yet he is also actually based upon the bodies of a white male. So there is tremendous fantasy and projection at work and at play. Because of the dirt on the floor and the circle of headlights, and the fact that you actually walk around on the installation itself - there is this sense of being on a movie set. And a sense of being a 1960's crime reporter, and a sense of being the witness to evil. There is a sense of being at the site of the real event - yet in its mythic state. There is the sense of being a crime photographer and homicide investigator. One of the cars is cut in half and juts out from a wall. Another features a hapless teenaged boy in the front seat, witnessing the crime while being helpless and possibly paralyzed by fear.

The scene also reminds me a Sartre play and film entitled The Respectful Prostitute, about American racism and sexual fantasy life in the 1950s. It is believed ot be based upon the Scottsboro Boys legal case whereby two white female prostitutes accused nine black men of raping them on a freight training crossing Alabama. In Sartre’s story the investigator is shown to have terrific sexual fantasies about the woman.

Five Car Stud 1969-1972, overhead view of the defilement of the man's body in action.

One of the men pulling the rope to hold the man down who is about to have his genitals cut off for dating a white woman

The man standing with his hand on his green pickup truck while watching the terror.

A close up of the goon and his green pickup truck.

The woman who was giving her love to the black man is still in the truck and is crying. The radio is playing. There is fifth of liquor bottle that was being enjoyed.

Edward Kienholtz's Claude Nigger Claude (1988) at the Schirn, Frankfurt, Germany, 2011

night view of the hotel scene

A close up view in daylight.

Claude Nigger Claude appears to be about a black man/Negro waering a suite and checking into a hotel, but riding up the service elevator instead of the elevator in the lobby.

Edward Kienholz's The Art Show (1963-1967)

The Art Show, corner view

LA Art Uproar - Over Kienholz's Back Seat Dodge scupture that depicts a couple making love in the back seat of an old car. Kienholz was driven to incite his viewers with representations of the the unsavory and evil elements of America life.

Edward Kienholz's Back Seat Dodge, at LACMA, Los Angeles

According to his Wikipedia page “In 1966, Kienholz began to spend summers in Hope, Idaho, while still maintaining studio space in Los Angeles. Also around that time, Kienholz produced a series of Concept Tableaux. which consisted of framed text descriptions of artwork that did not yet exist.”

Kienholz had "Ed Kienholz, EXPERT" painted on the passenger side door of his truck. A nice poke at the Mister Know-It-All world in general.

Edward Kienholz's Walter Hopps scultpure is a startling and extremely funny work. Its scale astonished me when I saw it - taller than a six foot man. And two-sided, complete with lists of artists names and even a funky old curator's roledex! I saw this at the Getty's Pacific Standard Time show that is traveling to the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin. I visited the MGB several years ago and saw an astounding exhibition of large-scale works from the US and Western Europe, made mostly in the 1950's and 1960's.

Walter Hopps sculpture - rear view/backside

please feel free to visit my website:

http://vincentjohnsonart.com/

LANYArtiststudio@gmail.com

Vincent Johnson received his MFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California 1997 and his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Painting 1986. He started out as a student in Pratt’s painting department. He is a 2005 Creative Capital Grantee, and was nominated for the Baum: An Emerging American Photographer’s Award in 2004 and for the New Museum of Contemporary Arts Aldrich Art Award in 2007 and for the Art Matters grant in 2008, and in 2009 nominated for Foundation for Contemporary Art Fellowship, Los Angeles. In 2010 he was named a United States Artists project artist. His work has been reviewed in ArtForum, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, Art in America, Art Slant and many other publications. His photographic works were most recently shown in the inaugural Pulse Fair Los Angeles. His most recent paintings were shown at the Beacon Arts Center in Los Angeles.

John Miller's gold paint covered sculptures. He was in the same class at Cal Arts as LA artist Mike Kelly.

The 2011 edition of the Rubell Family Collection’s annual show of new works they’re acquired opened again during Art Basel Miami Beach week. In this exhibition more than half of the work was from Los Angeles, which has received unprecedented international media attention as a center of art production. Yet because of Hollywood’s overwhelming dominance of the entire media universe in LA, outside of the Los Angeles Times, there is almost zero coverage of the Los Angeles artworld. There is not ever coverage of the arts on LA television, there are no radio interviews, not even a mention of MoCA’s record-breaking attendance for its Art in the Streets exhibition curated by Jeffrey Deitch. Fortunately for Los Angeles, other cities have developed major collector bases – such as Miami, and other art markets have developed since the 1990′s – such London, which has both an incredible array of arts coverage and a global art market as well as a river full of international British artists. So it is no surprise then that it is now for the second time in a few years that the Rubell Family Collection in Miami does a focused exhibition on LA Art. A few years ago the collection did a Los Angeles Art show called RED EYE. Even though I am based in LA I still needed to come to Miami to see this work – since it is collected largely through New York City galleries. By coming to Miami, this recent LA art is now seeing its LA audience for the first time. I note that while there is a great deal of media coverage of this exhibition, it is not being treated to multiple seriously considered historically contextualized examinations of the art on view. Unlike in London, which often sees public articles by world-class art historians in their newspapers. London also has vast arts coverage by the BBC and even Saatchi has an arts on television experience. The London newspapers often feature online exhibition walkthroughs with major critics. This barrage of arts coverage is precisely the case with the current Saatchi Collection New Art From Germany exhibition, which has already garnered six major London newspaper reviews. Saatchi also has its own free to the public art magazine and of course Saatchi online is the world most viewed artworld website with no one in second place. I mention this because it is clear that the US artworld is in deep need of intense art writing, while instead it is laying off all the art critics at almost every newspaper in the country outside of Manhattan. This level of critical engagement is necessary not to diffuse but to elevate the market’s tastes in art, before the future art historians figure the real aesthetic achievement of the work at hand. Miami Basel has no equal in the US, and that has to change too, as this country needs far less well-known but strong institutions to be participating in the international contemporary art arena, so that one day there will be no need for an artist to move to one of the coasts to be an artist, because the top of the mountain will be right there in the middle of America, the same height and grace as in the towers of New York and the mountains of California. Artists in Germany enjoy a super-world of cultural support and do not need America. With hundreds of magnificent museums, over 100,000 collectors in the Cologne-Dusseldorf region, which also has 30 contemporary art museums – the worlds largest collection – (with next door The Netherlands in second place in terms of total contemporary museums of art), and even daily intense arts coverage in their version of the Wall Street Journal and the intensely intellectually rigorous Text Zur Kunst. Atop this, German artists  are surrounded by art rich and highly advanced countries that also show and make art, write about it and think through it. Switzerland and France are but two of those countries. America needs to become like this someday. And then of course Germany has Documenta, and they can drive to Art Basel.

Vincent Johnson

Los Angeles, California

December 31, 2011/January 3, 2012

LA artist Sterling Ruby's gigantic sprayed paintings

Paul McCarthy sculptural installation of a man with a boy engaging a goat

Richard Jackson has been making a huge splash in the LA artworld of late. He has recently shown two other large-scale "splashed painting room" works in LA at David Kordansky gallery. In both instances as in this depicted work their is at least one animatronic figure in motion in the work.

Rashid Johnson's massive burnished wood work

LA painter John Mcallister's paintings

This tableau by Hanna Greeely is about time. The left side is the past; the right side, showing age and wear, is the present

Lisa Yuskavage's painting of a woman looking under her night clothes at herself

Lisa Yuskavage's painting of two women wearing only garters

George Condo's oil painting of a faceless red faced male figure and a cow

Dana Schutz portrait of a naked man in a swimming pool

Dana Schutz's vibrant oil painting

LA artist Henry Taylor's sculpture. This work was among many new sculptures created by Henry Taylor for his debut show at Blum & Poe in 2011

LA artist Mike Kelly's found stuffed animals and throwaway rugs as scatter art sculpture. In the background is LA artist's Karl Haendel's drawing of a newspaper story.

LA artist Richard Hawkins' painting

LA sculptor Charley Ray's sculpture of narcissistic men

Richard Prince - one of his paintings from his "Nurse" series that propelled him into the upper end of the art market.

Mark Handforth sculpture of a downed motorcycle covered in candles

Kaz Oshiro scupture of concert stage amplifier. Oshiro also had work at the Margulies Warehouse collection.

A magisterial radiance emanates from this greyscale and red painting by Julian Hoeber

Juliann Hoeber

Charles Long's whimsical sculpture

LA artist Evan Holloway's sculpture

LA artist Phil Wager (left wall), Jason Meadows, rear gallery, and Seth Price, right wall

LA alternative materials painter Analia Saban

LA artist Joel Kwack's work is mildly similar to Paul McCarty's

Elizabeth Peyton's portrait painting

Glenn Ligon's watercolor painting

Elizabeth Peyton's portrait painting

Works in the outdoor sculpture court of the Rubell Family Collection

Jennifer Rubell's new sculpture in the Rubell Family Collection sculpture court

LA artist Aaron Curry's metal sculpture in the Rubell Family Collection sculpture court

LA sculptor Nathan Mabry's work in the Rubell Family Collection sculpture court

Kelley Walker's large-scale photo montage.

Vincent Johnson received his MFA from Art Center College of Design in 1997 and his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Painting 1986.  He is a 2005 Creative Capital Grantee, and was nominated for the Baum: An Emerging American Photographer’s Award in 2004 and for the New Museum of Contemporary Arts Aldrich Art Award in 2007 and for the Art Matters grant in 2008, and in 2009 nominated for Foundation for Contemporary Art Fellowship, Los Angeles. In 2010 he was named a United States Artists project artist. His work has been reviewed in ArtForum, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, Art in America, Art Slant and many other publications. His photographic works were most recently shown in the inaugural Pulse Fair Los Angeles. His most recent paintings were shown at the Beacon Arts Center in Los Angeles.

Vincent Johnson during his recent art trip to London

please feel free to visit my website:

http://vincentjohnsonart.com/

LANYArtiststudio@gmail.com

William Leavitt installation

Nancy Rubin's sculpture

My annual visit to the Margulies Warehouse collection is always one of the premier highlights of visiting Miami during Art Basel Miami Beach. This collection is for like a small teaching museum of contemporary art. Its strengths and its focus are in sculptural works, installations and international photography. On each of my visits there are always new bodies of works by artists I whom I have read about while living in Los Angeles, but have never seen the work in person. This institution leads quietly; yet is a perennial showcase of world-class art that should never be missed. Miami is so fortunate to have this institution and the competing private collections, including the De la Cruz Collection, the Rubell Family Collection, and the Cisneros Fontenals. It is absolutely the case that even the most well-traveled curators and artists and collectors have not seen all the work that is on display in starting each December, or even a bit earlier as in the case of the Margulies Warehouse, which launches its new collections show in mid-November of each year. Over the years I’ve seen sensational video projects by Issac Julien and Chantal Ackermann that I was not even aware of their having been made until I saw them at the collection. The collection is exemplary of what has been called “the Miami Model” of private art collection spaces in the Miami Wynwood and Miami Design District areas. Up the road I guess we will see the opening of Craig Robin’s space and perhaps even that of Norman Braman’s monster collection of modern and contemporary art. Until then I will keep returning to the collection and to Miami each December, all the while alerting friends of the wonder that is Miami during the fairs.

Michaelaneglo Pistoletto smashed gold framed mirrors work, from his Venice Biennial performance

Video showing Michelaneglo Pistoletto smashing gold framed mirrors, from his Venice Biennial performance

Roy Lichtenstein 3 dimensional work

Jason Rhoades neon sculpture

Jonathan Monk painting on a car hood of an Ed Ruscha photograph

Large-scale Art photography from Germany

Kaz Oshiro's faux objects painted sculpture of washing machines

The back of Kaz Oshiro's scupture of 2 washing machines

Joseph Kosuth neon sculpture

PhotoLight boxes of the Neon Boneyard, Las Vegas, Nevada

John Baldessari print suite with toenail in place of neck and face

Anton Gormley sculptures on upper floor of the collection space

Fokwang de Jong sculptural installation

video installation of animals at play

Los Angeles based artist and writer Vincent Johnson

Vincent Johnson received his MFA from Art Center College of Design in 1997 and his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Painting 1986.  He is a 2005 Creative Capital Grantee, and was nominated for the Baum: An Emerging American Photographer’s Award in 2004 and for the New Museum of Contemporary Arts Aldrich Art Award in 2007 and for the Art Matters grant in 2008, and in 2009 nominated for Foundation for Contemporary Art Fellowship, Los Angeles. In 2010 he was named a United States Artists project artist. His work has been reviewed in ArtForum, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, Art in America, Art Slant and many other publications. His photographic works were most recently shown in the inaugural Pulse Fair Los Angeles. His most recent paintings were shown at the Beacon Arts Center in Los Angeles.

please feel free to visit my website:

http://vincentjohnsonart.com/

LANYArtiststudio@gmail.com

http://vincentjohnsonart.com/

I enjoyed half a dozen freshly prepared oysters at this food booth that was set up just next door to the Saatchi Collection. After this I went on to visit the collection's current exhibition.

“The Saatchi Gallery leased the building for 25 years and began working with AHMM to redesign the interiors to suit a gallery rather than office use.”

Saatchi Gallery

Duke of York Square, London. 2008

• Project Details
• Completion: 2008
• Clients: Saatchi Gallery

The new Saatchi Gallery is located within the listed walls of this former Drill Hall known as The Duke of York’s Headquarters off the King’s Road. The site was chosen after the practice spent three years with The Saatchi Gallery evaluating new and refurbishment opportunities. The building is stripped back to its shell and a new entrance sequence locates fifteen interconnected galleries on three levels. Much time and effort has been invested in the detailing to ensure that the art can be viewed and the architecture, both old and new, recedes into the background.“

The Duke of York HQ in 1801 and 2008

CGIs by Smoothe

An exhibition at the 70,000 sq. ft. 15 galley Saatchi Collection in the former Duke of York's HQ

The internationally famous Saatchi Collection is free to all.

Markus Selg painting

“Perhaps best known for its Wagnerian associations, the word ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ can be translated as a total, ideal or universal work of art, or as a synthesis of different art forms into one all-embracing unique genre. As such, many works in this exhibition reflect on the boundaries of art, in terms of our perception of it and its relationship to other disciplines. If their work points to a new kind of Gesamtkunstwerk it is one in which high and low culture, the avantgarde and the historical, the everyday and everything in between can co-exist. Running through the exhibition is an inherent reference to another quasi-Gesamtkunstwerk: the baggage of postwar German visual culture and the work of earlier generations of German artists, from the Expressionists to
Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, Martin Kippenberger, Rosemarie Trockel, Gerhard Richter and Franz West, with whom many of the artists in this exhibition seem to be in conversation.” – Saatchi Gallery

Thomas Helbig sculpture

Thoms Helbig painting

Featured Artists

Dirk Bell
Alexandra Bircken
André Butzer
Zhivago Duncan
Ida Ekblad
Max Frisinger
Isa Genzken
Felix Gmelin
Jeppe Hein
Thomas Helbig
Georg Herold
Volker Hueller
Thomas Kiesewetter
Jutta Koether
Friedrich Kunath
Stefan Kürten
Josephine Meckseper
Kirstine Roepstorff
Julian Rosefeldt
Markus Selg
Gert and Uwe Tobias
Corinne Wasmuht
Andro Wekua
Thomas Zipp

Greetings. This is Los Angeles-based artist Vincent Johnson. I was in London a few weeks ago to see several shows including the Gerhard Richter retrospective at the Tate, the debut show of White Cube Bermonsdsey and the New Art from Germany show at the Saatchi Collection. I took photos of most of the work in the show, and added a few pictures from online at the end of this post to complete my offering of my personal view of the exhibition.

The scale of the paintings relative to the far lesser scale of the sculptural work was what most immediately stood out in the exhibition. There seemed to be an enfolding of what called Scatter Art and later Installation Art either into a unified object form or being encased inside a vitrine. There was both strong painting in the traditional historical sense as well as graphics based image making. There was work that seemed determined to enframe itself within a dialectic of the politics of consumerism, with a supposed all-seeing eye throwing back the veil, and there was work that was satisfied to view itself and to be viewed as both mysterious and magical, strange and wonderful, without being repetitive of strong works of the past, but instead providing a means to echo history and be in the now all at once. In the course of doing this post I marveled over the sheet number of smart and authoritative articles on the show. We in Los Angeles have Hollywood at our backs and their global media instruments DO NOT train themselves on the Los Angeles art scene, unless they are personally involved and invited to be media stars at Hollywood film industry event organized by the LA artworld. London has phenomenal art writers and even world-class art historians who write not at the level of the least educated but at the level of the most advanced global audiences. The Saatchi Collection has its own magazine that is free at the front desk. LA artist Raymond Pettibone was featured on the cover with another artist at the time of my visit.

Here then I have captured several excerpts from recent London newspaper articles on the New Art from Germany exhibition. Enjoy.

“With a wheelchair swathed in hologram foil and her “Kinder Filmen”, tall mirrors stuck with adhesive tape, ripped magazine pages and spray paint to suggest overloaded urban façades, the presiding spirit at Saatchi’s King’s Road space is the morbidly unstable Isa Genzken, Richter’s second wife. The earliest examples of her work here are from the series “MLR”, lacquered paintings of gymnasts’ rings frozen in mid-air from 1992, the year she and Richter separated. The theme is presumably letting go, although I couldn’t get allusions to hanging ropes and nooses out of my head.

At the heart of the show are Genzken’s junk towers – absurdist pillars such as “Urlaub” (Holiday), wrapped in photographs and topped with a sun hat, outsize wine glass and tennis racket, “Bouquet”, studded with plastic flowers, and “Mutter Mit Kind” (Mother with Child), featuring a battered doll, lopsided chair and reproduction of Leonardo’s “La Belle Ferronière”. Subverting sculpture’s plinths and classicism’s columns, these interrogate form with an end-of-empire twin-towers mournfulness: even the joky “Urlaub” unsettles by including a medieval image of Christ crowned by thorns. But Genzken parodies superabundance too – civilisation on auto-destruct through our compulsion to manufacture and consume unlimited, unnecessary objects.

I have never warmed to Genzken’s crazed, downbeat aesthetic but this is the most graceful, persuasive account of her work I have seen.”

“But Saatchi is nothing if not pluralistic. Against the school of Genzken, he shows the garish stick-figures of Georg Herold, which have an anarchic spirit recalling Herold’s rebel-friend Martin Kippenberger, and the tactile, fantastical world of multimedia artist Markus Selg. What makes Selg riveting are his carvings, reminiscent of Kirchner’s sculptures: intense, contorted, elongated wood, jute and straw figures at affecting half- or three-quarter life-size: “Anima”, “Eva”, “Abgrund” (Abyss), “Betender” (Prayer), “Trauernde” (Mourner), which lack facial features and achieve emotional resonance through gesture and physical expressiveness alone. What makes Selg fashionable is the Gesamtkunstwerk installations in which he displays these – monumental digital photographs, printed on fabric, of landscapes and primitivist mannequins composed by compressing sci-fi and classical images on a computer screen.”

“Who among these weird, wonderful or wearisome artists will we recognise in 10 years or remember in 50? Does it matter? Writing in the excellent History of the Saatchi Gallery (Booth-Clibborn Editions), Norman Rosenthal notes that Roger Fry’s post-impressionist exhibition included many irrelevancies, and in an 1870 Parisian census 70,000 people declared themselves artists – of whom today we know 40 at most. Thus, says Rosenthal “the reality, and cruelty, of art, and the importance of its mediators and presenters”. That is the wider context for appreciating this most eclectic exhibition yet at this gallery – and why it remains worth watching what Saatchi does next.
Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times London, 11.18.2011

“Meckseper grew up in the late 1960s in Germany in a family associated with the Red Army Faction/Baader-Meinhof Group, and has spoken of wanting to merge “philosophical and political concepts with art production”. She makes sculpture, video, installation (she made an installation predicting the financial crisis, which included a sculpture of fake vomit), painting and photography, probing into the failure of capitalism, exposing corporate corruption and challenging western consumerism. She has said of her glass-and-steel vitrines: “Their shiny surfaces are meant as provocations for destruction. They are designed to be targets, like high-end shop windows being smashed during riots and protests. These works mimic retail aesthetics in order to activate the commercial zone into a political one.” Rebecca Wilson, Director, Saatchi gallery, The Telegraph, London, 12.02.2011

“Gesamtkunstwerk represents Saatchi’s purchasing power too, of course: his recent outlays, risks and bets. It takes a sharp interest in the market; you might say it depicts the market to some extent. But it also offers an experience of contemporary art that few of us will see without travelling to Berlin at least, and it’s one in the eye for Tate too, being the kind of show that none of our public museums can afford.” Laura Cummings, The Guardian, London, 11/26/2011

“Zhivago Duncan’s Pretentious Crap could have replaced Gesamtkunstwerk as the exhibition’s title, but its application to his huge glass case containing a model railway and other mechanicals enlivening the landscape of Cappadocia, is not merited; it may not be art, but it is exquisitely constructed, part fairground amusement, part Chapman Brothers without the horror, and well worth a moment’s child-like awe. Glass cases are evidently the in thing in Germany, filled with organised junk or subversively arranged to resemble the windows of stores that sell prosthetic appliances, underwear and perfume.” Brian Sewell, Evening Standard, London, 11/24/2011

“What does it tell us about German art now? There’s a certain coolness about this entire show. German artists stand back from their art-making with a tiny smirk of knowingness on their faces. They have absorbed quite as much as needs to be absorbed about the past, whether it be distant or more recent, and their practice, by and large, consists of a kind of clever, extended commentary upon that which has gone before. Generally speaking, they are not afraid to talk politics or to mess with the issues of the day. Above all, they adore junk, and they dislike too much refinement.” Michael Glover, The Independent, London 11.22.2011

Andre Butzer painting

Gert & Uwe Tobias painting

Ida Ekblad painting

Isa Genzken sculpture

Andro Wekua painting

Andro Wekua photo installation

Thomas Zipp installation

Thomas Zipp installation - table, map, photographs

Max Frisinger scupture

Thomas Kiesewetter sculpture

Georg Herold sculpture

Alexandra Birchen scupture

Jutta Koether painting.

LA artist Vincent Johnson photographing Jeppe Hein's shaking mirror piece

Friedrich Kunath painting installation

Dirk Bell sculpture

Felix Gmeli painting

Julian Rosenfeldt montage

Josephine Meckseper scuptural installation

Stephan Kurten painting

Volker Hueller watercolor etching

Kristine Roestorff collage

Zhivago Duncan installation sculpture

Corinne Wasmuht painting

265 Southwark, South London

In November of 2011 I traveled to London to see several exhibitions and to shoot my first ever photography project there. For this purpose I checked into the Bermondsey Square hotel in SE1, Southwark, London, to be in near to Borough market for my morning’s breakfast meal, and to be in short walking distance of South East London at the end of Bermondsey street and further south.

I decided to shoot with two Canon cameras that could fit into my hand and would not need a flash to shoot at night. After eating a late night meal at a nearby all night falafel restaurant, I ventured across Kent road in Southwark with camera in hand. The photos her are a small part of what I shot, and are selected in part for thematic reasons as well as for the aesthetic dimensions they explore and forefront.  The neighborhood reminded me of sections of Brooklyn, New York, with its continuous wall of apartments and family owned fast food restaurants in every direction. But then I would hear the distinctive cry of a London ambulance, and would stare into the reverse flow traffic, and there would be no doubt that although there were clear similarities between this enclave and African-American sections of Brooklyn, there were unique cultural differences as well. There seemed to be a West Indian population in the vicinity, based upon my seeing a few Caribbean restaurants that were still open after midnight. I visited the neighborhood twice after midnight and shot storefronts and buildings, sometimes as people passed by. I also shot in North London and walked across London Bridge into the City of London my first night there. A suite of paintings will follow in response to these and other photographs I shot, as well as art that I saw at The Tate Modern, including the permanent collection and the Gerhard Richter retrospective, the Courtault, the National Gallery of London, The British Museum, and the debut show at White Cube Bermondsey.

What has struck me about the 265 Southwark, South London picture as well as Abstraction at to 261 South London, both shot in the vicinity of Southwark, London, is how these two photographs frame what would be considered an advanced form of abstract collage/painting, with a representational image of an apartment address as the single bit of language that anchors the picture in the real world. Following this are photos shot between the walls of two closed business establishments, which yielded the remarkable abstractions that capture the aging and weather work billboards and decaying building sections.

Vincent Johnson

Los Angeles, California

12/11/2011

Abstraction at 251 South London

72-74-76-78-80 South London

All Night Drinks service - London

Apartment 261- South London

London between two walls

London is a wall between two nights

London is a wall between two fights

London nightwood - the peephole

London in the shadow of the sign

South London door locks

Public bar South London

The Royal Blue Door - South London

Virgo's of South London

London at night: The red bus

Memorial to the Blitz: City of London

London Magistrate Court

A Hospital in Southeast London

Vincent Johnson received his MFA from Art Center College of Design in 1997 and his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Painting 1986.  He is a 2005 Creative Capital Grantee, and was nominated for the Baum: An Emerging American Photographer’s Award in 2004 and for the New Museum of Contemporary Arts Aldrich Art Award in 2007 and for the Art Matters grant in 2008, and in 2009 nominated for Foundation for Contemporary Art Fellowship, Los Angeles. In 2010 he was named a United States Artists project artist. His work has been reviewed in ArtForum, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, Art in America, Art Slant and many other publications. His photographic works were most recently shown in the inaugural Pulse Fair Los Angeles. His most recent paintings were shown at the Beacon Arts Center in Los Angeles.

please feel free to visit my website:

http://vincentjohnsonart.com/

LANYArtiststudio@gmail.com

Grayscale painting No. 1

Vincent Johnson's Nine Grayscale Paintings - white paint layer applied and drying in my studio

Vincent Johnson's Nine Grayscale Paintings - installation shot

During the summer of 2011, after going to an art talk in Highland Park in LA while the Los Angeles Lakers were being decimated by the Dallas Mavericks, I decided that I would again put into play the knowledge I had acquired about how a painting was constructed. I had abandoned painting over 15 years ago while in grad school in Los Angeles, in favor of working with photography. One of the key motivating factors in my wanting to paint again was how much I now knew about the history of the medium – not merely of what the pictures looked like, but literally how they were made with a variety of techniques used to build the first layers from light to dark or from dark to light, followed by dozens if not 30 or forty layers of glazing as in a painting by Corot. One of the issues for me as well was seeing how many artists in LA and New York were making one layer paintings that were not visually satisfying. It was clear to be that the technique of making a painting all at once and in one day was not working for all too many artists. And it was obvious to me that many of the paintings I was looking at were made without realizing that the majesty of painting is achieved primarily through the layering of paint, as paint itself is a film, no different from a film get being used to create a certain kind of light in a film. So what I set out to do was to create Abstract Paintings using the techniques of Representation and Realism. Not surprisingly, the quality of the paint I was using produced visual effects that were far more compelling than had I tried to force the paint to behave in a certain way. I allowed for greatest chance events on the canvas, and limited my palate to a range of gray, black and white paints, as well as silver and gold from top grade artist paint companies. The first Nine Grayscale paintings were exhibited during the late summer in Los Angeles at the Beacon Arts Center. I prepared each canvas by layering each one with basic grayscale underpaint, then allowed them to air dry for well over a week. I then returned to each canvas and applied a layer of the finest white paint on the market, along with a mixture of painting medium, then again allowed as much as two weeks for this layer to dry, before attacking each canvas with a wide array of studio tools and brushes and  rags to get the visual effects I wanted to make. After this I allowed each layer to again dry and then came in with brushes and the full range of my palate and more glazing medium, finally completing the Nine Grayscale paintings over a two month period. I documented the paintings at the different stages I’ve described here. For my second group of grayscale paintings I decided to go to 30×40 inch canvases, up from 20×24 inches, to see if the techniques I was using could be applied to those scales as well. One of these paintings has been left at the second stage – the white paint both covering and conveying the strong grayscale underpaint beneath. With my now also doing cutout collages again, prompted by my creating a new work for The Bearden Project, I am now working in painting, cutout collage, photography, photomontage, and soon will be posting video shorts from my upcoming trip to London.

http://vincentjohnsonart.com/

feel free to contact me at:  LANYArtiststudio@gmail.com

Grayscale Painting No. 2

Grayscale painting No. 3

Grayscale painting No. 4

Graysale painting No. 5

Grayscale painting No. 6

Grayscale painting No. 7

Grayscale painting No. 8

Grayscale painting No. 9

Vincent Johnson's Nine Grayscale Paintings - installation shot - 1

Vincent Johnson's Nine Grayscale Paintings - installation shot - 2

Vincent Johnson's Nine Grayscale Paintings - studio shot - 1 (Silver hand)

Vincent Johnson - in my studio working on my Nine Grayscale Paintings

Vincent Johnson's Nine Grayscale Paintings - first stage of grayscale painting

Vincent Johnson's Nine Grayscale Paintings - studio view of stage one of grayscale paintings drying

Los Angeles based artist and writer Vincent Johnson

Vincent Johnson received his MFA from Art Center College of Design in 1997 and his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1986.   He is a 2005 Creative Capital Grantee, and was nominated for the Baum: An Emerging American Photographer’s Award in 2004 and for the New Museum of Contemporary Arts Aldrich Art Award in 2007 and for the Art Matters grant in 2008, and in 2009 nominated for Foundation for Contemporary Art Fellowship, Los Angeles. In 2010 he was named a United States Artists project artist. His work has been reviewed in ArtForum, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, Art in America, Art Slant and many other publications.

http://vincentjohnsonart.com/

LANYArtiststudio@gmail.com

Chicago Merchandise Mart: Bust of Robert Wood

Former US Brigadier General Robert Wood was President and Chairman of the Board of Sears, Roebuck after Julius Rosenwald.

Chicago Merchandizing Mart: Bust of Edward Filene

Edward Filene was based in Boston in the 19th century. He is responsible for Americans having credit unions. He had traveled abroad and noticed this scheme and desired to bring it to America to give everyday citizens the opportunity to save money and borrow it without usury or dealing with loan sharks.

From Wikipedia:

“To immortalize outstanding American merchants”, Joseph Kennedy in 1953 commissioned eight bronze busts, four times life size, which would come to be known as the Merchandise Mart Hall of Fame.

• retail magnates Frank Winfield Woolworth, Marshall Field and Aaron Montgomery Ward
• Julius Rosenwald and Robert Elkington Wood of Sears, Roebuck and Company fame
• advertiser John Wanamaker, merchandiser Edward Albert Filene, and A&P grocery chain founder George Huntington Hartford.

Behind the Merchandise Mart

Chicago Merchandise Mart: Bust of Huntington Hartford

Huntington Hartford inherited the A&P (Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea)  supermarket chain fortune, which once was the largest chain in the world with 16,000 store.

Chicago Merchandise Mart: Bust of John Wanamaker

John Wanamaker was born in Philadephia. He is considered to be one of the founders of modern advertizing and marketing. His department store was famous in both his native Philadelphia as well as in New York City.

Chicago Merchandise Mart: Bust of Julius Rosenwald

Julius Rosenwald developed the Sear, Roebuck & Co. mail order business when most Americans still lived in rural territories and small villages.

Chicago Merchandise Mart: Bust of Marshall Field

From Wikipedia:

“Field took an early 19th century consumer landscape that was centered around the principle of caveat emptor, or “buyer beware”, and transformed it into a plush shopping experience fit for the gilded age. Unconditional refunds, consistent pricing and international imports are among the Field innovations that became standards in quality retailing. The quotes “Give the lady what she wants” and “The customer is always right” are attributed to Field, though the latter may also be an invention of Harry Gordon Selfridge while employed by Field.^“

Marshall Field is responsible for the existence of the Field Museum of Natural History. He had to be convinced to fund the institution – and him being made aware of a living legacy did the trick. Marshall Field and John D. Rockefeller founded the University of Chicago.

Chicago Merchandise Mart: Bust of Montgomery Ward

Montgomery Ward founded the world’s first mail order business.  The stores named after him were once the largest chain in the United States.

Chicago Merchandise Mart: Bust of F.W. Woolworth

Prospect 1 New Orleans welcome sign

Dan Cameron

With Orange County Museum of Art’s hire of Cameron, this brings in yet another world-class curatorial personage into the Southern California region, and specifically and definitely adds to the already heady cultural thrust of the Los Angeles Artworld. Already the now electrified field that will be the 2013 California Biennial and future Cameron curated shows will cause a dramatic shift in the power structure now shared between LACMA, MoCA, The Hammer, and in 2013, the Broad in downtown LA directly across from LA MoCA on Grand Avenue. I can easily foresee Cameron organizing massive international shows in Los Angeles and Orange County warehouses that garner global media attention.

Dan Tague

Leandro Erlich

Chief Curator Dan Cameron’s appointment starts in January of 2012. Already on the table is the California Biennial for 2013 (which initially seemed to lose its place when the inaugural LA Biennial that opens in 2012 and will showcase only young art was announced). According to the Orange County Register, Cameron will curate the first ever large-scale exhibition showcasing the private collections of Modern and Contemporary Art in Orange County, one of the most affluent regions of the U.S. This event alone will place the now quiet Orange County art collecting activities in both the international spotlight and in direct competition with the private art collections in Los Angeles. I cannot wait to read the catalog for this exhibition when it becomes available.

Cameron’s curatorial history is long and powerful. In 1982 he curated the first ever museum exhibition of gay and lesbian art in the U.S. at the New Museum, in an exhibition entitled Extended Sensibilities.

In 1986 Cameron curated the exhibition entitled Art & Its Double at the Fundacion ‘la Caixa.” The exhibition was held in both Barcelona and Madrid and was the first European museum exhibition of the works of Jeff Koons, Phillip Taafe, Haim Steinbach and Peter Halley. (I recall that Halley had critical theory reading group during the 1980′s in New York.)

According to the Orange County Museum of Art’s press release, Cameron was also at this time researching contemporary Spanish Art, and was the first international critic to write about artists such as Susana Solano and Juan Munoz and Juan Ulse.

In 1988 Cameron curated an exhibition that introduced several artists into the global context of the Venice Biennale. These artists included Mike Kelly, Ilya Kabakov, Barbara Bloom, Carroll Dunham, Yasumasa Morimura and Tatsuo Miyajima, and many others.

According to the museum’s press release, Cameron then embarked upon a research campaign into the cultures of South America and the Carribean. He then presented room scale installations in 1991 in an exhibition entitled The Savage Garden, which included works by Charles Ray, Ann Hamilton, Christian Marclay and Barbara Bloom, as well as projects by Cuban born Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Venezualian born Meyer Vaisman. Cameron’s third curatorial expression on Spain was at the Museo Renia Sophia in Madrid. Entitled Cocida y Crudo, it entailed displaying the works and working closely with 70 artists in 40 different countries. Appearing in this exhibition included artists such as Martin Kippenberger, Gabriel Orozco, Marlene Dumas and Rirkit Tirvanija. The press release states that in 2010, on the 25th anniversary of the (300,000 square foot) museum’s début, Spanish critics hailed this show as the most important one in the museum’s entire history.

8th International Istanbul Bienal: From left to right: Gorgun Taner General Manager, Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (organising institution of the Biennial), Sevisimin Comert Birced General Manager, Japan Tabacco International, Turkey (main sponsor of the 8th Istanbul Biennial), Dan Cameron Curator, 8th International Istanbul Biennial, Emre Baykal Director, International Istanbul Biennial

In 2005 Cameron curated the Istanbul Biennial. The artists under his wing in this enterprise include such world-class art stars such as Do-Ho Suh, Fiona Tan, Mike Nelson, Doris Salcedo, Monika Sosnowska Kendal Geers, Monica Bonvinici, David Almejd, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Jorge Macchi, and Pascale Martine Tayou.

Do-Ho Suh

Mike Nelson

After this exciting curatorial endeavor Cameron curated an edition of ev+a in Limerick, Ireland. Then Cameron followed this up by serving as curator for the 2006 Taipei Biennial, entitled Dirty Yoga.

Here is Dan Cameron’s CV from the 2006 Taipei Biennial website:

“Dan Cameron

Since 1995, Dan Cameron has been Senior Curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, where he has organized exhibitions of William Kentridge, Paul McCarthy, Rivane Neuenschwander, Francesco Vezzoli, Cildo Meireles, Faith Ringgold, Pierre et Gilles, Doris Salcedo, Carolee Schneemann, Carroll Dunham, David Wojnarowicz, and Martin Wong, along with such group exhibitions as Living inside the Grid and East Village USA.

A specialist in global art, Cameron served as curator for the 8th Istanbul Biennial in 2003, and is currently curator of the Tapei 2006 Biennial, which opens at the Taipei Museum of Fine Arts in Nov 06. He has also organized international contemporary art exhibitions throughout the world, including Austria, Brazil, Ireland, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, Russia, and Sweden.

A frequent essayist for museum and trade publications on contemporary art, Cameron’s most recent publications include an exhibition catalog essay on Cai Guo-Qiang for the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin (Aug 06) and a fictional memoir for a book based on the work of Stephen Dean (Sept 06).

Cameron teaches critical theory as a member of the graduate faculty of the School of Visual Arts’ MFA program, and at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Education.

© 2006 TAIPEI BIENNIAL. All Rights Reserved.”

5th Edition of the Taipei Biennial, curated by Dan Cameron

Taipei Biennial

Taipei Biennial

Here is an excerpt from Dan Cameron’s essay entitled Poetic Justice for the Istanbul Biennial:

http://www.postmedia.net/04/cameron.htm

“One World

What is the purpose of art within today’s conflicted and fragmented societies? Can art’s meanings have a significant impact beyond its self-defined community of supporters and practitioners? Does society’s demonstrated need to protect and preserve art for future generations reveal a much deeper need to understand and share the workings of another’s consciousness, and to experience firsthand the struggles of human consciousness to push beyond the restraints of given realities? Does the art of today, and by extension poetry, music and other creative forms, reflect more profound aspirations that extend beyond the realms of beauty, pleasure and affinities of taste? Can art provide a model for inter-cultural communication and exchange that can be applied, even indirectly, to situations of greater and more urgent political import? Are contemporary artists and their creations harbingers of an approaching age in which the need to move beyond the limited definitions of self, nation, gender, class and race essential to the survival of the human species as a whole?”

After this Cameron was founding artistic director of Prospect New Orléans, the first edition of which featured 80 artists from 40 countries. Cameron most recently turned over the reigns to Prospect New Orléans to LACMA Chief Contemporary Art Curator Franklin Sirmans.

Louise Ehrlich

Dan Cameron’s career as an art critics and art writer spans over several hundred essays in books, magazines and catalogs. He was contributing editor to Arts Magazine from 1983 to 1990, and wrote a widely read column for Art & Auction from 1990 – 1995 called The Critical Edge.

For the Orange County Museum of Art, the New York and International Artworld have been brought to its doorstep. All it needs to do now is build its new cultural palace and follow through with its plans to work with visionary artists and institutions on projects worldwide, and Southern California is in for a great adventure into avant-garde art indeed.

—

I found this interview with Dan Cameron on Art & Its Double online:

Dan Cameron

In 1986 Dan Cameron curated Art and its Double in Madrid, one of the first exhibitions of the new Manhattan art to be shown in Europe. Similar work was later seen in the Saatchi’s show in London. Here Cameron discusses the rise of this new consumer art.

Peter Hill: The art of the early eighties belonged to the painter, particularly the new figurative painters such as Schnabel, Kiefer, Clemente, and a few years later Campbell, Wiszniewski, Currie and a battalion of Scots, many unsure of their direction, if not of their motivation. Do the late eighties belong to the sculptor?

Dan Cameron: I would give a qualified ‘yes’ to that question, because in addition to
sculpture we are seeing whole new areas being opened up in photography, we are seeing the re-birth of installation work and the advent of neo-conceptualism. Europe and America appear to be jointly leading the way in all of these developments. Louise
Lawler, for example, I would see as a sculptor, or an artist who thinks like a sculptor but is also involved in documentary procedures. Bernhard Prinz fits this category also. I would say that two thirds of what is exciting just now is non-pictorial. A list
of artists working in these areas would have to include Julian Opie, Hamilton Finlay,
Rosemarie Trockel, Katharina Fritsch, Grenville Davis, Mucha, Koons, Steinbach,
McCollum, Bloom, Holzer and Gober. The painting that is going on is more
involved with exploring projects as with Sherrie Levine or one of the most talented young Spanish artists Frederico Guzman whose studio I visited recently.

PH: What parallels do you draw between the work of today’s appropriation
artists, such as Sherrie Levine or Louise Lawler, and their precursors?

DC: Duchampian appropriation was never identified as a separate stylistic practice until
the late 70s because it was previously considered – in the work of Rauschenberg or
Duchamp, for example – merely a tool within a much broader technical repertoire. If
artists like Sherrie Levine or Richard Prince are to be separated from their predecessors
it is because they have narrowed in on the re-represented image as the point of departure for their work. It is this investigative tendency within their art which I believe links them more directly with Pop and Conceptual art than with appropriation’s ‘pioneers’
(a term which I find to be somewhat contradictory in the first place).

PH: What artists are you currently looking at who may not yet have exhibited outside
America?

DC: From my perspective, the primary distinguishing characteristic between
American artists who are successful in Europe versus those who are not is that
the former have gone to Europe to promote themselves. Consequently, artists that I’m
thinking about, but who have not exhibited outside America and who should be
better known would include the 19th century landscapists like Albert Pinkham Ryder as well as pioneer abstractionists such as Burgoyne Diller and John McLaughlin.
In contemporary terms, I would like to see two entire schools of American art
more recognised abroad. One is the abstract painterly tradition represented by
Elizabeth Murray or David Reed (and artists much less known than they are) and the other would be the Pop/folk iconoclastic figurative vein, running from imagists like
H.C. Westermann, Karl Wirsum or Peter Saul, through more freeform work like that of Mike Kelley or Archie Rand. I think that both genres represent a significant development peculiar to American art, and which are a far cry from the diet of American art to which most Europeans are exposed.

PH: Regionalism, from the Manhattan to the Australian or the Scottish variety is a
widely debated issue. I am wary of easy terms such as international or regionalism which often overlap I m of language rather than art?

DC: On the most basic level all art is regional and all art is international. I’ve become
accustomed in recent years towards thinking of groups of artists in terms of cities
rather than countries, because I think that many cities – Berlin or Amsterdam, Los
Angeles or Melbourne – Barcelona or Glasgow – have qualities which are more
apparent in their artists than those aspects which could be ascribed to a national style.
Otherwise, I think the only true provincialism belongs to cities that had had it and lost
it, so to speak – Paris is always the classic example of that. New York hasn’t reached that point, at least not yet. Otherwise, seeing that the international art world is becoming decentralised as opposed to recentralised it is as important to look at
regional work as that which has not been correctly appreciated by the world
outside.

PH: Do you see the New York Bad Painters of 1980, such as Richard Bosman, and
the Manhattan neo-geo artists – Halley, Bickerton, Koons – as belonging to the
same movement, ie a movement of quotation?

DC: Actually, the “Bad Painting” movement never seemed to be so much about quotation as it was about a generic approach to style, or painting as a type of social contract. The current crop of painters and sculptors seem to be more interested in art as a type of public language which can theoretically be understood by large numbers of people at the same time. Still, the difference to me between the early 80s
and the late 80s has been the shift from a microcosmic approach ( traditional art value
insularity, politics) to a macrocosmic approach (sociocultural values, legibility,
de-mythification).

PH: The exhibition ART AND ITS DOUBLE which you curated and brought to
Spain last year was one of the most exciting to be seen in Europe, certainly
in terms of paradigm change, since A NEW SPIRIT or ZEITGEIST. Are you currently
working on any other exhibitions?

DC: I was the American curator for Aperto 88 section at the Venice Biennale this year, a project that I’m still recovering from. I am a musician on top of everything else, so I’ve actually used this summer to record the demo for my band’s second record. A lot of exhibiting proposals are in the works, but nothing which has been absolutely confirmed. As far as writing is concerned I’m going to lay lower than I have been for the last couple of years, because I’ve felt a bit overextended.

PH: How important are market forces on the collector and on the artist,
especially in relation to the “consumer mirror” that many young artists are holding up to
their public. Where does irony begin and art stop?

DC: The boom in the contemporary art market has been phenomenal during the Age
of Reagan, as everyone expected it to be. This has lead to a heightened
number of opportunists, like advisors and so-called independent curators, as well as a
lot more galleries and individual curators, than there were before. Certainly, the change in aesthetics over the past few years have been in part an attempt to grapple with our
awareness that the art-buying public has suddenly become its most conspicuous audience. This is a full turn away from the street orientated aesthetics of
graffiti and the East Village look which preceded it, and which in retrospect may turn out to have been somewhat I in its outlook. Whether most collectors are aware of the ideological subtext to this shift or not is beside the point, because there are only a
small minority of collectors who buy for other than investment purposes anyway. I think the artists are hyper-aware of this situation, and are making a test case out of
having their cake and eating it, too.

–

Vincent Johnson is an artist and writer in Los Angeles

Curtains - film prop for sale (2001)

Motel pool - Motel Tangiers

http://vincentjohnsonart.com/ my ArtCat website

Johnson will be participating in The Bearden Project at the Studio Museum in Harlem, with a cutout-collage work created especially for the exhibition.

http://www.studiomuseum.org/exhibition/the-bearden-project

Johnson most recently participated in the début Pulse Fair Los Angeles, with Las Cienegas Projects

Johnson received his MFA from Art Center College of Design in 1997 and his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1986. He is a 2005 Creative Capital Grantee, and was nominated for the Baum: An Emerging American Photographer’s Award in 2004 and for the New Museum of Contemporary Arts Aldrich Art Award in 2007 and for the Art Matters grant in 2008, and in 2009 nominated for Foundation for Contemporary Art Fellowship, Los Angeles. In 2010 he was named a United States Artists project artist. His work has been reviewed in ArtForum, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, Art in America, Art Slant and many other publications.

Film still from the Gerhard Richter documentary

A Gerhard Richter abstract painting - where the emflamed underbelly of the picture's surface is exposed.

Table (1962)

Whatever criticism that was still lively from the MoMA show has been shot down by the current Tate Modern Gerhard Richter 2011 retrospective, that will be traveling to Berlin and Paris. My American friends are wondering how New York was left out of the list of viewing destinations, but that could be changed at any time based upon New York’s wish.

Woman Descending the Staircase (1965). (Oil on canvas; Art Institute of Chicago)

Uncle Rudi (1965). (Oil on canvas; Czech Museum of Fine Arts, Prague).

.

One other aspect of Richter’s rise to the heights that he has achieved now in both the market and the critical arena, is that he is part of the Cologne art world that LA artists such as Mike Kelly and Steve Prina (both of whom I studied with during the mid-1990′s) became a part of, as Cologne had the then omnipotent Art Cologne Art Fair. The Cologne-Dusseldorf (Nordheim-Westfalia) region of Germany also had over an astounding 100,000 art collectors. Even today Berlin’s scene has not dismantled that universe of collectors, and Richter must know that he never needed the Americans for his final validation. In fact it is a barely decade old institution, the Tate Modern, that is making Gerhard Richter a living lord of painting, and that is because London has positioned itself to be both a market, a taste mater, an art critic, and a presenter of ultimate art in the most privileged of surroundings. Perl’s criticism of Richter’s dry brush technique, whereby he removes the human signature of his art and instead leaves them with a glass surface like finish, for me only makes those works he produced in this way all the more stunning to behold.

-

Gerhard Richter: Claudius, 1986, oil on canvas, 311 x 406 cm,

Collection Landesbank Baden-Württemberg © Gerhard Richter

Man Shot Down 1 1988
© Gerhard Richter, courtesy Gerhard Richter Studio
Oil on canvas
100.5 x 140.5 cm

Richter’s Oktober 18, 19777 painting of Ulrike Meinhof, which shows the deep rope burns in her neck from her  having been strangled (or perhaps it truly was part of the Baader Meinhoff gang’s planned suicide mission at Stammhein prison, just outside Stuttgart.

Youth Portrait [of Ulrike Meinhof] (1988). (Oil on canvas; MOMA, New York).

‘Forest (3)’ (1990)

.

The author John-Paul Stonard’s Autumn 2011 article in Tate, Etc. on Gerhard Richter points out that many Germans considered the October 18, 1977 paintings suite to be of national cultural and historical significance, and therefore MoMA should not have been allowed to get the pictures.

-

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Gerhard Richter’s “Reader,” 1994,

Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild

Abstraktes Bild, signed, dated 1992 and numbered 780-4 on the reverse,

Oil on canvas 102 ½ by 78 ¾ in., 260.4 by 200 cm.

-

MOMA 2002 Retrospective Catalog

.

“Richter has always sought order in his life, and he works in an orderly way. Elger (a former secretary in Richter’s studio and now a curator at the Dresden State Art Collections and director of its Gerhard Richter Archive) mentions that as a student at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in 1961-64 Richter arrived at his studio every morning at 8, carrying a briefcase, like a businessman. No matter that it merely contained his lunch. Yet he seems regularly to have been attracted to those who flout the rules. His closest friendship from the academy was with a remarkable painter who took the name Blinky Palermo, a drug addict who died under mysterious circumstances in 1977 at 33. It’s clear from the interviews how much Richter still misses him. One longs to understand this friendship more deeply. Similarly, one would like to know much more about Richter’s second marriage, to another remarkable artist a generation younger than himself, the sculptor Isa Genzken. It is well-known in the art world that this brilliant woman, who represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 2007, has struggled with mental illness. Elger makes no mention of it. One former art dealer has published reminiscences like this: “I last saw her in New York in the wee hours on the dance floor of a Chelsea disco. Later she moved to Berlin, and soon had been banned from clubs and bars for her agitated behavior. I heard she was screaming: ‘fascist’ at customers and I saw her dead drunk sleeping on the demonstration furniture of a design store in the middle of Wittenberger Platz.” Perhaps knowing this merely satisfies the craving for gossip, as Richter would say; yet I would wager that his attraction to someone who was capable of such behavior (though the time eventually came when he could no longer handle it; he is now married to his third wife) reflects an intensity of his own, held in check only by his blessed rage for order. Richter later recalled Genzken as a “very strict” critic: “‘That’s ugly, terrible,’ she’d say.” Wouldn’t it have been worth trying to get a deeper sense of those conversations, and of the mark Genzken’s strictures might have left on Richter’s work afterward?” Evasive Action Painter: On Gerhard Richter

Barry Schwabsky | January 14, 2010

–

Gerhard Richter: Wald (Forest), 2005, oil on canvas,

collection of warren and mitzi eisenberg, a promised gift to the museum of modern art, new york

-

Wald is my favorite painting by Gerhard Richter. The color bands that soar to the top of the canvas before turning back on themselves, are stunningly gorgeous. I doubt that this spectacular picture could have been rendered by using representation working methods. For me what is so immense about this painting is that Richter recognizes that it his not his photographic mastery of the paint surface, but his allowing paint to do what it does when under a certain form of duress – in this case a 5 or 6 foot wide squeegie, to mix and overmix the paint into layers and levels of surface dimension that are dazzling to behold.

-

Gerhard Richter, “15. Nov.06, 898-12,” 2006. (Photo: Marian Goodman Gallery)

Richter in front of “September.”

November

December

4096

4900-colours-Gerhard-Richter

4,16, 256, 1024 (installation view)
At Galerie Zwirner, Cologne (1974)

Gerhard Richter, Abstract Painting (910-1), 2009,

Oil on canvas, 70 7/8 x 70 7/8 in. (180 x 180 cm),

Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

Gerhard Richter, Sindbad (905/1-49), detail, 2008,

Lacquer behind glass,

Each 11 13/16 x 19 11/16 in. (30 x 50 cm),

Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

Gerhard Richter, Sindbad (905/1-49), detail, 2008,

Lacquer behind glass,

Each 11 13/16 x 19 11/16 in. (30 x 50 cm),

Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

Gerhard Richter, Abstract Painting (907-13), 2009,

Oil on wood, 25 5/8 x 22 in. (65 x 56 cm),

Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

Gerhard Richter, Sindbad (905/1-49), detail, 2008,

Lacquer behind glass, Each 11 13/16 x 19 11/16 in. (30 x 50 cm),

Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

Gerhard Richter, Abstract Painting (906-5), 2008,

Oil on wood, 15 3/4 x 15 3/4 in. (40 x 40 cm),

Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

Gerhard Richter, Abstract Painting (894-1), 2005,

Oil on aludibond, 11 3/4 x 17 3/8 in. (30 x 44 cm),

Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

Vincent Johnson on an art trip in London

Vincent Johnson Biography  as of November 2011

Vincent Johnson lives and works in Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited at Soho House, Los Angeles, Palihouse, West Los Angeles, Las Cienegas Projects, LAXART, the P.S. 1. Museum, the SK Stiftung, Cologne, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Adamski Gallery of Contemporary Art, Aachen, Locust Projects, Miami, the Sacramento Center for Contemporary Art, 18th Street Arts, Santa Monica and the Boston University Art Gallery. His photographic works engage both significant and neglected historical and contemporary cultural artifacts and is based on intensive research of his subjects. Upcoming are projects in Europe and Los Angeles. His most recent work, a series of nine grayscale paintings, was shown at the Beacon Arts Center in Los Angeles in the group show entitled The Optimist’s Parking Lot. He will have a new cutout collage work in the upcoming The Bearden Project at the Studio Museum in Harlem, opening in New York on November 10, 2011. He also participated in the inaugural edition of Pulse Fair Los Angeles with Las Cienegas Projects. He is also participating in Locust Projects Miami’s annual benefit exhibition in the late fall of 2011.

California Toilet: Filthy Light Switch (Private collection, Miami, Florida) (2010)

Vincent Johnson’s Nine Grayscale Paintings – installation shot – 1

Vincent Johnson’s Nine Grayscale Paintings – installation shot – 2

Motel Tangiers, (San Fernando Valley) by Vincent Johnson (2003)

Parked wreck, Los Angeles (2005) by Vincent Johnson

Johnson received his MFA from Art Center College of Design in 1997 and his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1986.   He is a 2005 Creative Capital Grantee, and was nominated for the Baum: An Emerging American Photographer’s Award in 2004 and for the New Museum of Contemporary Arts Aldrich Art Award in 2007 and for the Art Matters grant in 2008, and in 2009 nominated for Foundation for Contemporary Art Fellowship, Los Angeles. In 2010 he was named a United States Artists project artist. His work has been reviewed in ArtForum, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, Art in America, Art Slant and many other publications.

http://vincentjohnsonart.com/

Eis 4, by Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter, Seestück (bewölkt)/Sea-Piece (clouded), 1969, (oil on canvas)

Gerhard Richter Seascape 'Sea-Sea' - Seestücky 'See-See' 1970 oil on canvas

Banks Violette's digitally animated loop of the Tri-Star Pictures horse, based upon Jack Goldstein's 1975 Metro-Goldwyn Mayer lion loop film.

BANKS VIOLETTE’S career arc seems to know no heights. I’ve followed his work for several years now – from his inclusion in Greater New York half a decade ago to his Whitney Biennial début and followup one person show there. All three shows were sensations. I am intrigued about his grappling with darkness as a means of artistic production, and even of his early on expression that his work in some way represents alienated white male youth. Some of his work’s titles refer to death and future suicide, yet I do not perceive this artist to be a poet like Kurt Colbain whom himself was in such a state of mental despair that he swallowed the barrel of a shotgun returned into eternity. What I am drawn toward by Violette’s narratives are his melding of the Conceptual Art language and philosophical discourses with Robert Smithson’s working methodologies and materials – salt being one example. Violette has traditional scultptor’s skills as well as Conceptual Artist’s internal logic. This for me is why he is what was derisively called during the 1990′s in Los Angeles {an object maker) while at once being a keen intellect. He is not shot down by yet another 1990′s idea that regarded painters as either retrograde or blissfully ignorant to the reality when that painting was dead, than work should be made by being farmed out, that works of art should be emptied of narrative. Of course now this all sounds as absurd as it should have sounded 15 and 20 years ago, but at that time Conceptual Art was winning because there had not yet developed a new international layer of the art market that was not only receptive to traditional narrative picture making – but it specifically sought out narrative painting, as well as updates on New York School art. I like knowing that Violette assists his assistants in producing his work, and that he drags in all the necessary tools and equipment to get his work made – so that what he called “an authenticity” can happen with his work. I studied directly with Jack Goldstein in 1995 while in grad school, so I am well aware of why an artist from a different generation would be so enamored of Jacks work. One of my mentors from that time occasionally will talk about what happened in Los Angeles during the 1990′s when certain graduate programs taught no traditional skills to its students, but buried them alive with Critical Theory. Many of the artists from that period are fully dependent upon having others realize their works at a time when the hand and traditional skills in painting and sculpture – combined with a Conceptual Art critical theory education – is causing a firestorm critically informed hand skill based works to come into the now gigantic international world of contemporary art. I personally have started painting again after working almost exclusively in photography and fabricated sculptures for well over a decade.

“… Shamim M. Momin, an associate curator at the Whitney and one of the Biennial’s organizers, said her interest in Mr. Violette’s work was spurred less by his dark subject matter than by his open embrace of the symbolic, following the lead of more established artists like Robert Gober and Matthew Barney. With some exceptions, the use of overt symbolism in the visual arts was out of fashion for most of the 20th century, thought to be the province of literature or religion. But a new generation of artists increasingly seems to see it, with varying degrees of directness and irony, as a valid way to communicate.” New York Times

“Vanity Fair photographed him (Banks Violette) lighting a Marlboro with a blowtorch.” NY Arts magazine

in 2007 Banks Violette opened his first New York solo show in five years at both Team and Gladstone galleries.  I was in New York and saw these two shows and was especially impressed when I saw saw several art students sitting on the floor while taking notes. The works in the show seemed to have come from a foreign world instead of a warehouse sized Williamsburg, Brooklyn studio.

“Salt was Smithson’s signature material, and the first time Smithson ever used salt was at Cornell.” Banks Violette.

Violette was a studio assistant of Robert Gober.

Banks Violette Interview

March 21st 10, 6:23 | Adam Bryce | Banks Violette, Gladstone Gallery, Team Galler

SLAMHYPE

“Banks Violette interviews are hard to come by, the Williamsburg based artist has made a name for himself through his mind blowing work rather than his words. This is an artist who erected a life-sized burned-out church cast in salt, who made a school chair sculpture out of bronze and fire, and has works on display at the MOMA, Saatchi Gallery, his work certainly speaks for itself. We visited Banks Violette’s newest show yesterday at Gladstone Gallery in New York’s Chelsea, the 4 new sculptures on display were each museum worthy, large scale conceptual pieces playing on the historic archives of the art world and their pending decay.”

“…this particular church, since the space isn’t built around a cruciform footprint but is, instead, just a straight shot through and then up and away—it’s the holy equivalent of a railroad apartment.” from Banks Violette’s interview with Alex Gartenfield.

“At 31, with a master’s degree in fine arts from Columbia University and the theory-laced vocabulary of a literature professor, Mr. Violette does not seem particularly dark. But behind him in the studio loomed a huge spectral structure that testified at the very least to his abiding fascination with the chaos of the world. It was a 12-foot-tall replica of a church, or more accurately the charred beams and gables left standing after a church had been burned. Instead of wood, however,the entire structure was made from salt, creating an architectural skeleton that at once evokes high Minimalism, gothic creepiness and a kind of ethereal ice-palace beauty.”

Banks Violette

“Banks Violette has created a visual language linked to his background and personal history that is derived from pop culture’s aestheticisation of death. This highly personal language is intended to provide an account of the disturbing psychology that underlies attitudes and acts that have defined the frustrations and anger of a marginalised group of white American youth. Beneath the surface of Violette’s pared down black sculptures, occasionally redeemed by the white of salt crystals, is a melancholy that sometimes sinks into sorrow. This sense of sadness with which all Violette’s work is imbued is linked to a tragic dimension of pop culture.”

“Goths and heavy metal have spawned a sub-culture of young people for whom extreme acts of violence are somehow more readily acceptable as part of the process of asserting identity than has been the case in a recent past that includes Violette’s own somewhat troubled youth. Citing examples where musical lyrics become instigating factors to real-life violence, he refers to an over-identification with fiction where fantasy and reality are blurred. Violette is interested in the moral ambiguities that result from this condition rather than seeking a catharsis.”

“He works backwards from a site of tragedy, exploring the emotional and psychic energy that lies beneath the suburban angst of a group disengaged from mainstream life. The burning of wooden churches in Norway by members of the Black metal music scene during the 1990’s is the subject for Untitled (Church) 2005. The charred frame of a ficitionlised church cast in resin and salt is as much a monument to a groups act of transgression as it is to the mythology and notoriety which subsequently followed.”  Frank Cohen Initial Access art collection.

This work reminds me of Duane Hanson's sculpture that graphically renders in hyper realism a downtown motorcycle - but this sculpture is missing the downed motorcyclist that Hansen portrayed. So then this sculpture for me has some relationship to the ghost bikes in New York: bike painted white and attached to street corner posts where the cyclist was killed. This of course is similar to the accident crosses that are in the Southwestern US on the highways, and even on the outer regions of Los Angeles. Like Warhol before him, Hanson decided to use graphic depictions of death after being criticized as to his art having no political or social meaning other than itself being a critique of obese, tasteless Americans.

“The ten graphite drawings and one salt sculpture that compose Banks Violette’s latest exhibition at Team Gallery, “Not Yet Titled,” are haunting creations; they’re attempts to breathe life into subjects whose lives have been lost. The death of the painter Steve Parrino acts as the backdrop to the exhibition: In the gallery, the first thing that greets the audience is a black vinyl square on the floor, which evokes the oil slick on which Parrino’s motorcycle slipped in a fatal crash. The black square is also a dimensional portal — and a nod to Kazimir Malevich’s masterpiece Black Square from 1915 — on which an outward projecting arm of road case benches is placed that links the installation of drawings like satellites orbiting a planet. ” Steve Pulimond, Art in America 2009

This sculpture of a downed motorcycle by Banks Violette is also made primarily of salt. It is a memento for the artist Steve Parrino, who died on New Years Eve in New York on his motorcycle on the first day of 2005.

ZODIAC (F.T.U.) / 74 ironhead SXL is the title of the work

Banks Violette, as yet untitled, 2008

This Bans Violette sculpture of the frame of a church that burned in Norway is made of primarily of salt. It was shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2005.

“(The Whitney installation is a reference to a picture of a burned church on an infamous black-metal album cover.)” NYTimes

This Banks Violette sculpture of a burning school student's chair reminds me of the riots in the United States in the mid and late 1960's. Even though this particular work purportedly comes into existence as a representation of angry and alienated white youth, it still represents for me all the historic and unknown incidents in America whereby extreme violence was perpetrated in reaction to feeling stripped of ones humanity.

Banks Violette sculpture

“Meeting me in his studio in mid-August, Banks Violette shook his head: “they talk about a post-studio practice” he mused, “sometimes I wonder if I’m in a ‘post-career’ moment.” In a culture primed to laud, collect, and consume “emerging artists,” Violette may stand as a litmus test of whether all of this attention is a good thing. For if ever a young artist was “having his moment,” Violette is. He has a full room in Greater New York at P.S. 1; a massive installation in Neville Wakefield’s exceptional group show Bridge Freezes Before Road at Gladstone Gallery; and a solo exhibition in the Whitney’s lobby gallery. Since May, the New York Times has graced him with not one, but three substantial write-ups (including a “Styles” section profile), and a fourth is on the way.” Ktie Stone Sonnenborn, New York Times, 2005

Installation by Banks Violette. Photo: Courtesy Gladstone Gallery.

Vincent Johnson during his recent art trip to London