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j i m lo n g
j i m lo n g
CUE Art Foundation September 7 – October 14, 2006 Curated by Rackstraw Downes
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CUE Art Foundation
Artist’s Statement
Jim Long
We are honored to host this exhibition of the work of Jim Long, generously curated by fellow
Juggernaut is a group of four paintings I made between 2003 and 2006. They are works in a
artist Rackstraw Downes. Long, originally from Springfield, MA, has long been admired by his
series that began in 1988. At the time I was looking for impersonal visual material: spatters, stains,
peers as an artist who has forged a unique artistic voice over the years Mr. Downes’ appreciation
visual “noise”, complex accidents. I combined incompatible materials like water or crushed ice with
of Mr. Long’s paintings demonstrates how the Foundation’s discretionary selection process allows
oil paint and ink. In trying to create an accident, most of my effort showed manipulation when
the unfettered expression of each curator’s views.
what I wanted was facts. A real accident is hard to come by.
In 1991 I noticed that oil paint left floating in water formed small interesting
The works in this exhibition a part of a series Mr. Long began fourteen years ago.
We appreciate that artists often work tirelessly without thought or concern of exhibition opportu-
structures, like cartoons that existed in dimensions between two and three. I caught some of these
nities. CUE is pleased to recognize such commitment by affording just such an opportunity, thus
configurations on paper, and later found out what I was seeing was the fractal irregularity of the
celebrating the efforts of artists such as Mr. Long.
“classic mess” I was looking for years before. It was the same phenomenon the botanist Robert Brown had seen in 1827: the physical trace of invisible molecular activity that kept pollen grains floating in water in perpetual movement.
This is common visual imagery. It’s a material/perceptual layer with elastic
dimensions. Scaling replaces perspective and illusion, figure and ground shift constantly. Delacroix wrote in 1864 about drawing small rocks and seeing that their irregular forms were identical to those of nearby cliffs.
A few years ago I was in an empty room and for a moment imagined four large
discs covered with linear movement. I recognized the images: thirteen inch mylar circles I had put aside ten years earlier. When I thought about the amount of work it would take to translate them into large paintings “juggernaut” came to mind, though I wasn’t quite sure what it meant. While I was working on the first paintings I looked it up and found the word comes from the Sanscrit name for Jagannatha, a title for Krishna and Vishnu meaning “protector of all that moves”, including things invisibly small.
Curator’s Statement
Rackstraw Downes
The four consummate and monumental works that make up Jim Long’s show are collectively titled For Jagannatha, after the Hindu god. In these works, the normally conspicuous stamp of human decision making appears to be absent, and art making resembles a protracted natural process, like the formation of stalagtites on the ceiling of a cave. In For Jagannatha, Long’s process creates colonies of matter made up of tiny warm dark branchings, lying on a blonde surface of natural cotton duck and dispersing towards a proto-circular periphery. In their slight but bewilderingly endless internal variations these colonies image a society held together not by laws, hierarchies or leaders but by an indivisibly affiliated consistency of substance. Long maps them on the most singular of geometrical areas—only one directional decision determines the periphery of a tondo—and the one to which they most nearly, and almost, correspond. But they behave organically; like garden vegetables in rows, or versals on backgrounds in illuminated manuscripts, they spill over the tondo’s confines and offset its inflexibility. At their boundaries, where the dispersing energy appears to conclude, they mass more densely in an act—so it seems—not of territoriality but of self-defining completion: to the viewer they say with satisfaction: “Now I am whole”.
Florence
1988 Oil, ink and graphite on paper 14" x 11"
untitled
1994 Oil on mylar on aluminum 4 discs, 12" diameter each
The Drunken Boat 1994-95 Oil on canvas 109" x 210"
Saturn Devouring 1996 One of His Oil on canvas Children 28" x 28"
top: Out of Kishkindhya 1996 (Hanuman #1) Oil and wax on canvas 40" x 60"
bottom: Hanuman (Night)
2000 Oil and enamel on canvas 48" x 68"
top: For Jagannatha 1993-2003 Working Drawing 1 Oil on mylar 13" diameter
bottom: For Jagannatha 1993-2004 Working Drawing 2 Oil on mylar 13" diameter
top: For Jagannatha 1993-2003 Working Drawing 3 Oil on mylar 13" diameter
bottom: For Jagannatha 1993-2005 Working Drawing 4 Oil on mylar 13" diameter
For Jagannatha 1
2003 Oil on canvas 126" diameter
For Jagannatha 2 2003-2004 Oil on canvas 126" diameter
For Jagannatha 3 2004 Oil on canvas 126" diameter
For Jagannatha 4 005 Oil on canvas 126" diameter
Biographies
Jim Long
Jim Long was born in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1949, received a B.A. in Art History from Swarthmore College, and attended San Francisco Art Institute. He moved to New York City in 1976, and began exhibiting work in galleries and museums here and in Europe in 1981. He worked in set design and technical production for dance and theatre, and has taught for many years in the summer program of the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation. He is a contributing writer at the Brooklyn Rail.
Rackstraw Downes Rackstraw Downes was born in England in 1939. He took his B.A. in English Literature at Cambridge University, England in 1961 and his M.F.A. in Painting at Yale in 1964. He has since divided his time between New York, Maine and Texas. He has had solo shows in New York at the Kornblee; Hirschl & Adler Modern; Marlborough; Robert Miller; and Betty Cunningham galleries; and at Texas Gallery, Houston. His work is represented in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Carnegie Institute; the Hirshhorn Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Ludwig Museum; the Museum of Modern Art; the Nelson-Atkins Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1979, Downes edited Art in Its Own Terms, Selected Criticism 19351975 by Fairfield Porter. In 2000, Downes published In Relation to the Whole: Three Essays from Three Decades – 1973, 1981, 1996 (Edgewise Press) and Under the Gowanus and Razor-Wire Journal: The Making of Two Paintings (Turning the Head Press). In 2005 Princeton University Press published Rackstraw Downes by Sanford Schwartz, Robert Storr and Racsktraw Downes. Downes received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998 and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999.
Mission Statement
CUE Art Foundation
CUE Art Foundation, a 501 (c)(3) non-profit arts organization, is dedicated
Board of Directors
to providing a comprehensive creative forum for contemporary art by
Gregory Amenoff
supporting under-recognized artists via a multi-faceted mission spanning
Theodore S. Berger
the realms of gallery exhibitions, professional development programs and
Patricia Caesar
arts-in-education.
Thomas G. Devine
CUE Art Foundation was established in June of 2002 with
the aim of providing educational programs for young artists and aspiring art
Thomas K. Y. Hsu Brian D. Starer
professionals in New York and from around the country. These programs draw on the unique community of artists, critics, and educators brought together
Advisory Council
by the foundation’s season of exhibitions, public lectures, workshops, and its
Gregory Amenoff
studio residency program: all are designed to be of lasting practical benefit to
William Corbett
aspiring and under-recognized artists. The entire CUE identity is characterized
Meg Cranston
by artistic quality, independent judgment and the discovery of genuine talent,
Vernon Fisher
and provides long-term benefits both for creative individuals associated with
Malik Gaines
CUE and the larger art marketplace. Located in New York’s Chelsea gallery
Deborah Kass
district, CUE’s 4,500 square feet of gallery, studio and office space serves as
Irving Sandler
the nexus for educational programs and exhibitions conducted by CUE. executive Director Jeremy Adams Director of development Elaine Bowen
Cover: Studio view of, at left: For Jagannatha 1, 2003, Oil on canvas, 126"
programs coordinator
diameter; at right: For Jagannatha 3, 2004, Oil on canvas, 126" diameter
Beatrice Wolert-Weese
Photo credits: Regina Cherry: pg #11; Jim Long: cover, pg #10; Kevin Noble: pg # 5, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17; Ken Showell: pg # 6-7, 8-9
programs assistant Kara Smith
ISBN: 0-9776417-5-9 All artwork © Jim Long Catalog designed by Elizabeth Ellis