v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Futility as destiny

From 2007, The New Yorker's  Schjeldahl's view of Rauch's exhibition and talent at that time:

he surprise is that worry-proof conservatism can generate real artistic force. It does so, in Rauch’s art, by finding opportunities, in trumped-up fantasy, for recovering traditional aesthetic capacities of painting. Having nothing to say, he says it ever more marvellously. Tinterow helps us gauge one signal quality by extending the show into a room of the Met’s permanent collection which contains pictures by such stalwarts of painterly expressiveness as Lucian Freud, Alice Neel, Leon Kossoff, and Georg Baselitz. The collegial affinity alerts the eye to almost subliminal wonders of brushwork in Rauch’s stolid mise en scène. He could do anything that those artists do, the comparisons imply, were he not committed to more important tasks, such as, in “Die Fuge” (“The Fugue,” or “The Gap”), reporting the event of a bearded man emerging with a chain from a heaved fissure in the earth, while what appear to be firemen labor obscurely, a man and two women (or half women, merging with each other) levitate next to a brick shed that bears bubble-lettered graffiti, a mountain looms—and that’s far from all. Epic and ridiculous, the tableau wields its felicities with a comical lightness, as of throwaway witticisms. My attention to the picture finally focussed, with pleasure, on a marginal passage of still-life: an unidentifiable animal part in a dish rests on a fish atop a book on a cloth on a table. The detail constitutes a lovely oddball painting in itself.

Come to that, still-life seems to be Rauch’s lurking, fundamental genre. His people are objects. He arranges them. Everything, including snatches of abstract design or facture, feels imported from somewhere and put in place, where it stays. In “Der Nächste Zug” (“The Next Move,” or “The Next Draw”), cigarette smoke, blue-gray on a black ground, doesn’t rise or drift; it locks down into a calligraphic abstraction of a vaguely nineteen-forties, European sort. Not that noticing the stylistic echo profits a viewer anything. The more observant you are of erudite allusions in the show (some male figures display particular airs and dress styles of nineteenth-century German Romanticism), the more acute will be your frustration in trying to make sense of it all. If Rauch’s work is nightmarish, as some critics have asserted, the effect pertains not to its dramas but to their mockery of understanding. They are not mysterious, because mysteries imply solutions. Rather, they convey that we may know plenty but our knowledge is useless. There is a highly contemporary sting in this. Today, we are flooded with accurate information—letting us confidently judge the failures and iniquities of political leaders, for instance—and we naturally feel that such clarity must influence events, but it only amplifies our dismay as the world careers from one readily foreseeable disaster to another. Rauch sets us an example of getting used to it.

Conservatism takes grim, or not so grim, satisfaction in demonstrations of human folly. It has a major pictorial philosopher in Rauch, who calmly implicates himself, and art, in a vision of futility as destiny. “Die Flamme,” which seems quite explicitly a metaphorical self-portrait, presents a riding-jacketed man, in a landscape, striding the length of a long wooden box of painting materials. He carries semaphorelike flags. His legs are lashed to planks that extend upward to form an X. The flame of the title is a pale flare in the sky, over the distant horizon. The image might be read as an allegory of inspiration contingent on an acceptance of grotesque handicaps. Or it might not. But I think I’ve never seen an excellent painting that is so masochistically cheerless, to the point of revelling in a contemplation of impotence. I would like to despise the artist for this, but his visual poetry is too persuasive. Present-day reality is a lot more like one of his pictures than I wish it were

My Neo Rauch

Vallejo Nocturno 2013 - from exhibition poster in Brussels

Mug Shots

Ben Durham Works

From The Village Voice:

Knowing nothing about the subjects (except that they're criminals—allegedly) allows our sinister fantasies to come out to play. Jack (2012), a white guy with a goatee, looks like an Appalachian tweaker. Kwame (2012), a black man, lifts his chin in defiance of the cop behind the camera. Heather (2012) is blond and pretty, but the photographer seems to have caught her as she passed out; still, she looks like she should be sitting at the gallery reception desk, not in a cell.

The works themselves are gorgeously precise. Durham manages to capture facial expressions as well as contours and texture with his streams of gibberish, an effect that echoes Paula Scher's maps built of words. Inscribed into the thick surface of the paper, which Durham makes himself, the writing achieves a tactile quality. At close range, the portraits take on the texture of a shaggy rug.

Durham's texts have a bittersweet subtext: Nicole Klagsbrun plans to close the doors of her gallery at the end of the exhibition. Klagsbrun could have gone out any way she wanted, but in choosing Durham, a sobering young artist whose work is concurrently on display at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., she has signaled that she wants to depart gracefully—and quietly. "He first brought his work to me on a truck from rural Kentucky," she says. "Now he's being embraced by the art world."

Sub Atomic Visual Structural Paranoia in the 21st Century

Vallejo Nocturno 2013 - in Brussels

From Wikepedia:

The Atomium is an iconic building in Brussels originally constructed for Expo '58, the 1958 Brussels World's Fair. Designed by the engineer André Waterkeyn with interiors by architects André and Jean Polak,^[1] it stands 102 m (335 ft) tall. Its nine 18 m (59 ft) diameter stainless steel clad spheres are connected so that the whole forms the shape of a unit cell of an iron crystal magnified 165 billion times.

Tubes connect the spheres along the 12 edges of the cube and all eight vertices to the centre. They enclose escalators and a lift to allow access to the five habitable spheres which contain exhibit halls and other public spaces. The top sphere provides a panoramic view of Brussels. CNN named it Europe's most bizarre building.^[2]

And the strange case for worldwide copyright rights:

AM, Belgium's society for collecting copyrights, has claimed worldwide intellectual property rights on all reproductions of the image via the United States Artists Rights Society (ARS).^[4] For example SABAM issued a demand that a United States website remove all images of them from its pages.^[5] The website responded by replacing all such images with a warning not to take photographs of the Atomium, and that Asbl Atomium will sue if you show them to anyone.^[5][6] Sabam confirmed that permission is required.^[5]

Ralf Ziegermann remarked^[7] on the complicated copyright instructions on Atomium's website specific to "private pictures".^[8] The organisers of Belgian heritage, Anno Expo^[9] (planning the 50th anniversary celebrations of Expo '58), in the city of Mechelen announced a "cultural guerrilla strike" by asking people to send in their old photographs of the Atomium and requested 100 photoshoppers to paint over the balls.^[10][11] SABAM responded that they would make an exception for 2008 and that people could publish private photographs for one year only on condition they were for non-commercial purposes.^[10]

Anno Expo later announced they had censored part of their own report due to "complications" and referred to a meeting they had with SABAM.^[12] Mechelen's Mayor, Bart Somers, called the Atomium copyright rules absurd.^[13]

On February 23, 2009 Axel Addington, Web Content Manager for Atomium, e-mailed a clarification to the Glass Steel and Stone web site, which some years earlier redacted its photographs of the Atomium after being threatened. He stated, "The royalties are perceived (sic) by the descendants of André Waterkeyn, the engineer who conceived Atomium in 1955, and not by the A.S.B.L Atomium. So, you've probably been sued by the SABAM (Belgian Copyright Company) because of the Waterkeyn Family."

From the Atomium's website, the current copyright restrictions exempt private individuals under the following conditions,^[14]

    >>> This is the case where photographs are taken by private individuals and shown on private websites for no commercial purpose (the current trend for photo albums). In accordance with legislation, usage rights for the image of the Atomium would naturally extend to 4th October 2075, in other words, the seventieth anniversary of André Waterkeyn's death.

April Night

Neo Rauch, Aprilnacht, 2011, oil on canvas, 118 1/8” x 98 3/8”

From ArtPulse Magazine, Stephen Knudsen writes:

The 10-foot-tall April Night breaks ranks by reeling back into something calm and quiet. Reasons for this are difficult to deduce, as Neo Rauch has become increasingly guarded about his personal iconography. Though he understands the impulse to have his rhetorical inventory explained, ultimately he feels the work best reveals its intellectual and visceral evocations over time in non-verbal space. Speaking with Hanna Schouwink, gallery partner and long-time advocate of Rauch, one gets more ringside clues into the work. She spent time with the artist in his studio while this body of work was in production. Ms. Schouwink confirmed Neo Rauch’s concerted intention to pare down April Night, remarking that originally there were three figures in the painting. The calm in April Night feels like a good exhale-a counterpoint to the super-packed and active imagery of the artist’s other paintings.

In April Night, the building, excavating, carrying and pulling of a typical Rauch painting is reduced to thinking. The two figures lounge on stumps, communing with an owl and an owl’s head-not unlike the bizarre Max Beckmann paintings with figures holding fish in unholy ways. All of his work acknowledges the limitations and yet the great will power in human energy, and interpreting his iconography at that starting point is often effective.

The owl can be seen as the wide-eyed hunter in search of inspiration. The woman and man, with their eyes closed, are trying to decipher and process that inspiration. They signify the artist as hunter, with paintbrushes placed in the falconry gloves. However, sometimes there is no inspiration. Sometimes the artist finds it. Rauch does not stop there, because the thinking and the introspection are written in some code in nature. Stumps make letters on the ground, and branches seem to spell something out in the sky. It does not matter what the message is other than some kind of information about to ignite.

Neo Rauch has lived most of the 51 years of his life in or near Leipzig, Germany, the city of his birth. Even while East Germany was communist, he stayed and was conditioned in a way that those artists who left for the free West could never be. He witnessed the limping economy of communist East Germany (GDR) and the sprawl of uninspired gray concrete that was the Berlin Wall. He saw Leipzig poison itself with industrial waste, and he experienced the physical and psychological repression-all of this constant until the euphoric reunification of Germany when he was 30 years old. In the 1980s, Rauch studied painting at Leipzig’s Academy of Visual Arts, choosing to embrace the figure in painting even though it was certainly distasteful that the figure was key to Social Realism, the GDR-sanctioned art. Indeed, signifiers of coping with repression, as he experienced it, populate his works. In April Night, the figures wear the coats of East German border guards-a nod to the past and the long-vanquished wall. The man also wears guard boots, but as a 21st-century fashion update the woman’s boots are pink. . . .

. . . . April Night evokes the idea of thought, both intellectually and viscerally. We intellectualize the thinking figures, but we also feel the invitation to meditate through the formal qualities of the work. The painting plays down Mr. Rauch’s characteristic wild, graphic-like design, and he gets the idea of thought across in a new way, here, by allowing figures, objects and ground to tonally merge more than usual. In a sense, a little Leonardo sfumato has taken hold, and I am not simply speaking just of the little smoke from the fire. Forms dissolve in the atmosphere of twilight. This is a quiet color language that speaks to the electrical impulses of thinking, which are akin to the voltage through the power line and April’s near emergence into a Northern European spring.

Even the process of the painting is about a stream of thought let loose. Rauch works without any preparatory drawings and photographic mediation, starting with an object or face and letting it evolve organically. In a recent interview with Rita Pokorny, Mr. Rauch said that hopefully the work becomes “an animal, a living thing…As soon as I have the feeling that the thing has blood circulating through it, a nervous system, a skeleton, then questions as to the message become completely marginal.”² Rauch clearly wants the viewer to come away moved on a gut level rather than just an intellectual level.

Riddle Pictures

Interview with painter Neo Rauch:

Your works have been called riddle pictures. But riddles have a solution, and there are no solutions in your pictures.

Solutions don’t come into it. My pictures supposedly have a vital quality, like an animal, a living thing. There is no need to understand, only to feel that this creature is, to the greatest possible degree, at peace with itself. It is not always possible to realise, but that’s how I imagine a functioning picture. As soon as I have the feeling that the thing has blood circulating through it, a nervous system, a skeleton, then questions as to the message become completely marginal.

Several of the figures in your work come from German history, which has led some people say that you paint in a socialist realist style.

That is other people’s problem, not mine, especially over here. I have never attempted to “de-Germanise” my work. Besides, people mostly have only a ro gh idea of what socialist realism is. I’m not trying to dodge the issue, but I think that they reach this conclusion because they know that I come from East Germany. They might reach the same conclusion by looking at the work of Raymond Pettibon and Michaël Borremans.

This misunderstanding is surely a result of the age-old opposition between abstraction and representation, which you have satirised, for example, in Unerträglicher Naturalismus [Intolerable Naturalism], 1998, and Abstraktion, 2005. Why are people in Germany so ready to associate this conflict with you?

I am repeatedly told that I have a problem with abstraction. This is nonsense, I only have a problem with bad pictures.

Do you see yourself as a kind of landscape painter, even though landscape often appears as an altogether artificial construct?

I still need someone to pose as a farmer. No tree can measure up to the attraction I feel towards the figure.

That sounds like a declaration of love for your fellow humans, despite the doom-laden scenarios you depict…

By 1945 the exploitation of images and emotions before and during the second world war led to a rejection of figurative representation in favour of a clear decision for abstraction. Today this division no longer necessarily demands our attention. I always like to compare my work to a game of chess—fundamentally it is all about placing figures and features, something that has consequences. The one determines the other. Everything takes place on the surface: colouration, composition, figuration must in themselves be plausible. A certain legibility must be guaranteed, otherwise it’s nonsense.

Will the recent events in Japan and Libya influence your work?

These things have been present in my works for some time. I began this work [in his studio] before Fukushima, and who would deny that it resonates with a certain disquieting radiation? My exhibition in Warsaw (until 15 May) opened on the day the earthquake struck; my 50th exhibition was clouded by the Icelandic volcano; and the picture Uhrenvergleich [Synchronising Watches], 2001, which shows smoke billowing from a skyscraper, was painted in the same year but before the attack on the World Trade Center. It’s hard to resist crowing about my prophetic abilities.

How long have you been with Gerd Harry Lybke and Eigen+Art?

Since 1982. My first exhibition at the gallery was in 1993. That was my first significant solo show and I was 33. Today students go mad if they haven’t had their first solo show by the age of 23.

How did you experience the political upheavals of 1989/90? Did you feel as if you had been thrown in with the sharks of the western art scene?

It was more the case that I didn’t actually do anything at all, since no one was particularly interested in painting. At that point painting was once again being written off as dead. I don’t know whether it’s always the same idiots who decide this, but every ten years there is a cockerel that climbs onto the dung heap. At the time I said to myself, fine, now I can lead the life of a loner, a painter dwelling on the forest edge, I can become a “best-kept secret”. The irony is that something quite different emerged out of it.

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Interview with Sheila Heti

Sheila Heti, Ryan Kamstra, Sholem Krishtalka, Margaux Williamson. Photograph by Lee Towndrow.

From The Paris Review, an interview with Heti on her new novel, How Should a Person Be?:

Let’s talk about your process. How did you take your conversations from your life and weave it into fiction?

I don’t know. I did lots of different things. But the conversations were not meant for a book. I was just taping friends. I didn’t have a plan for where I was going.

Did you think you were writing your play?

I wasn’t sure. I’d spent the previous five years working on Ticknor, and I wanted to sort of shake that off me. So all the transcribing I was doing was kind of like drinking a glass of water—it was refreshing, like a palate cleanser—a way of getting out of my imagination. Taping and transcribing was part of looking around to see what things were really like in my environment. I’d been completely in my room, in my head, not looking at anything.

That reminds me of something Tilda Swinton once said about filmmaking—it’s a social way of making art. What do you think happens when you’re working like this?

Well, the writing becomes more like life in that you don’t know where you’re going to end up, and you don’t know what’s going to end up being important. It’s like how in life you can meet somebody and not think much of them, then a few years later you’re married and in love, but the person you were really drawn to and thought, This is it!—you forget about them six months later. When I began transcribing, I was certain that I wanted to write a book with no people in it, about the workings of a supermarket.

That sounds so different than the book you ended up writing!

I know! It just seemed really relaxing to write a book that was not about feelings and not about people. Of course, what ended up happening was completely the opposite. My friend, the writer Lee Henderson, actually e-mailed me a dream he had after I told him that my new book was not going to have any people in it. He was like, “I had a dream that you wrote your new book and there were people in it.”

Is the question “How should a person be?” a question that really preoccupies you?

It did. But I only realized that when I figured out the title. Then it became even more of a preoccupation. I think I wouldn’t necessarily have put it in those words before that; it was a general feeling, of not trusting myself and anxiety and wondering, and also a feeling that there were these Platonic truths out there, that if only I could have access to …

I see.

I think it was Margaux who said it should be the book’s title when she saw it on the wall in big block letters when she came to visit me one summer at Yaddo. I can’t remember if I was thinking about it as a title or just thinking about it.

Margaux sounds like a terrific friend. Though, of course, I know her mostly through this fictional lens of your novel.

She is. We’re both incredibly bossy, but not with each other.

I loved how stark you were about ambition. But why does the Sheila character desire fame over, say, wealth or power?

I was thinking a lot about Paris Hilton and all those girls like Lindsay Lohan who were in the tabloids. I was wondering what I might have in common with them, to find the seeds of them in me, then think about those aspects, and emphasize those. I don’t see their drive as being riches so much as fame.

Do you think this is a modern obsession of ours?

Renown is something people have always wanted, but maybe what’s modern is that it’s considered a virtue, this desire, rather than a vice. I might be wrong about this.

I think you could be right; that makes a lot of sense. I know that Lena Dunham recently recommended your book in Entertainment Weekly. Have you been watching Girls?

I love it so much. I was on the train down to New York yesterday and I watched episode 6, then watched my favorite scenes from the first five episodes. I don’t think I’ve ever done that before—rewatched scenes from something I’ve liked. It felt like rereading the scenes you love in a book.

Totally! Which scenes?

I love her expression in the sixth episode where she’s watching the dance performance at the benefit; that’s a very subtle expression, looking around at her hometown and evaluating it. I like when Adam admires her pencilled eyebrows in another episode and says, “You look like a Mexican teenager,” and she’s like, “I’m NOT here to talk about that.”

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