That is Then. This is Now.: Curated by Irving Sandler and Robert Storr

CYNTHIA CARLSON DONNA DENNIS DAVID DEUTSCH MARTHA DIAMOND HERMINE FORD MIKE GLIER LOIS LANE THOMAS LAWSON KIM MACCONNEL

THAT IS THEN. THIS IS NOW. Curated by Irving Sandler and Robert Storr

CUE Art Foundation 511 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001 212-206-3583 f 212-206-0321 cueartfoundation.org

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This is the title Medium. Date

This is the title Medium. Date

EXHIBITION SPONSORS: AGNES GUND SALLY & WERNER H. KRAMARSKY

EXHIBITION SUPPORTERS: WILLIAM BOLTON CHERYL BROCK CLAIRE FELDMAN NOLA STEINBERG KARL JENSEN JO-ANN MAKOVITZKY VALERIE MARQUEZ SUSAN SHATTER ROSARIO VARELA "

THAT IS THEN. THIS IS NOW. Curated by Irving Sandler and Robert Storr September 9th – October 30th, 2010

INTRODUCTION We are honored and grateful to present this exhibition generously curated by Irving Sandler and Robert Storr.

In keeping with its mission to serve under-recognized artists, CUE invited Mr. Sandler and Mr. Storr to conceive of an exhibition that highlighted artists they felt were not receiving their due recognition.

They decided to select artists who were at the forefront of their artistic practices in the seventies who continue to make important work. This exhibition affords us the delightful opportunity to become reacquainted with the work of these talented artists.

We appreciate that artists often work tirelessly without thought or concern for exhibition. CUE is pleased to recognize such commitment by affording this opportunity, thus celebrating the efforts of these nine artists.

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CYNTHIA CARLSON DONNA DENNIS DAVID DEUTSCH MARTHA DIAMOND HERMINE FORD MIKE GLIER LOIS LANE THOMAS LAWSON KIM MACCONNEL

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DIALOGUE

Irving Sandler and Robert Storr

IRVING SANDLER: During the late 1960’s and 1970’s, the Vietnam War increasingly invaded the art world’s thinking. The war seemed interminable and was dispiriting. The body bags kept coming home, each one turning ever-larger numbers of Americans against the war. “Hey, Hey, LBJ, How many kids did you kill today?” The country seemed to be tearing itself apart. In 1968 alone, there were huge anti-war protests at the Pentagon, student uprisings in Europe and our own universities and massive demonstrations at the democratic convention in Chicago. This single year was a particularly depressing one, given the Tet Offensive, the My-Lai Massacre, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the nomination of Hubert Humphrey for the presidency, and the election of Richard Nixon. And the news didn’t seem to get better.

ROBERT STORR: By 1975 the war was over and the year before that, Nixon has ignominiously left office as a result of the Watergate Scandal. Meanwhile, the economy lurched from bad to worse.

The concerted action of the OPEC cartel caused oil prices to spike in 1973, setting the stage for the worst stock market crash since the Great Depression. In many ways the “Then” and “Now” referred to in the title of this show had similarities – war, debt, and a sense of fitful directionlessness. The 1970’s were international conflict, civil discord, polarization and stagflation; the present is international conflict, civil discord, polarization and a chain reaction of expanding and exploding economic bubbles. Swell times to make art.

SANDLER: You are right to highlight changes in the social situation in the 1970’s and the concomitant changes in the sensibility and the art of the decade. Two of the artists we selected did make political comments, Mike Glier, explicitly in his portraits of politicians, and Thomas Lawson ambiguously. As the Vietnam War wound down, Feminism emerged from the anti-war movement and generated the

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main political energies. Cynthia Carlson was a leading Feminist and her Pattern and Decoration painting exemplified its thinking. She established decoration and crafts, which historically had been the “work” of women but not considered “art,” into her high art and in the process to elevate the “work” of her sisters that preceded her.

STORR: A number of older artists provided license for recourse to bluntness, awkwardness or indifference to “good tastes” and properly painterly table manners – those being the negative side of “painterly cuisine” as handed down from School of Paris art through preceding generations of The New York School. Chief among these was Philip Guston, who died in 1980 just as the transition from Pattern and Decoration and New Image art into Neo-Expressionism took place. His way with the brush – broad strokes, “crude” contours and a simplified palette – was a great encouragement to many younger artists whose work doesn’t outwardly resemble his but possesses the same fresh, “making up as I go along” quality. Another was Leon Golub, and along with him Nancy Spero. At the outset of the 1980’s, Golub and Spero began showing with artists half their age, as did Louise Bourgeois. Robert Colescott was another elder who refused to act his age. He refused to settle down and make pictures pleasing to mainstream taste-makers. Guston, Golub, Spero and Colescott were avowedly political artists while most of the people in this show were not. For the most part, the politically minded artists of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s shied away from painting and chose other, usually photo-mechanical means. But what of the others of our show, like Martha Diamond and Hermine Ford, both of whom could paint a “good” painting, but chose to pair away the Frenchness of inherited painting culture to get at something rawer.

SANDLER: In 1969, I wrote that modernism implied a progression of new and original styles, emerging one after the other, each coming in to view, becoming established and then becoming dated.

Make-it-new was the avant garde rallying cry; what had been done was not worth re-doing. I suggested the individuality of an artist’s vision and the artistry with which it is embodied in a work would be prized more than its innovation or up-to-datedness. Art had pressed to so many of its limits, that is, the edge where it could be taken for non-art. The avant garde ceased to exist because there had developed a large and growing public that no-longer responded in anger to unconventional art and while not eager for it, was at least curious or permissive. The audience for new painting and sculpture would have to prize the expressiveness and individuality with which artists use and mix known ideas and styles, how artists, in a phrase, re-make-it-new. This seems to me to be the situation for the artists we chose. They are among the earliest to have found themselves in the post-modern era.

STORR: In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s art came to a fork in the road in that some artists, in effect, decided to make art “about” those second thoughts and others decided to explore the second thoughts, and see where they went. Irony was often part of the latter course. David Deutsch and Donna Dennis are both romantics of a sort – and both decided that invoking places that exist in the imagination was a kind of conjuring trick that could be performed without historicizing their ideas and explicitly footnoting their precedents in the American Scene. The results have a kind of dream fascination that irony subtly reinforces rather than undermines.

They openly re-invite the suspension of disbelief whereas many of their contemporaries focus on disabusing the public of its illusions.

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SANDLER: Painting was still embattled, but in the Post-Modernist era, it not only seemed open to new possibilities, but able to claim art world attention, as it had not in the previous decade. As a painter, Thomas Lawson challenged so called Pictures Artists, most of whom made photo-based work and declared “Painting is Dead.”

The artists in the Pictures exhibition (Artists Space, 1977) seemed to make-it-new because they ransacked images from mass media. The show was arguably the timeliest of the late 1970’s.

Most Pictures artists agreed with the curator of the show, Douglas Crimp, who vilified painting as pure lunacy. He not only put it down as reactionary, humanist and bourgeois, but he also claimed it had nothing new or relevant to say. Painting was, in a word, passe.

Thankfully they did not go unchallenged. Thomas Lawson argued that if art was to be an agent of social change, as he believed it should be, painting was his medium of choice. Photo-based imagery – as well as so-called post-studio conceptual art – was culturally obscure and invisible to all but a few art theoreticians, and therefore useless as a means of social change. In contrast, painting still retained the authority to command public attention and hence could be politically effective. As for my response to these art-theoretical polemics, they amused me and, at the same time, I found them inconsequential, often fatuous, although they may have contributed to significant art.

Cynthia Carlson

" Experiment, process and invention were part of defining oneself, and what it meant to be an artist. In my circle of friends “career” wasn’t in our lexicon. Impermanence was readily accepted and the whole point of the enterprise was to somehow “get the work out” in whatever venue possible, whether it existed in the normal channels of the art world, or was invented, ad hoc."

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Triple Buldges, 1975 Acrylic on woven canvas 48” x 78” Collection of Dr.’s Barry and Cheryl Goldenberg

Night Time, 2007 Oil on canvas 60” x 60” Photograph Courtesy of Karen Bell

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Donna Dennis

" The women’s movement came along and with it consciousness-raising groups. The self-examination that was involved in participation in such groups led me to rediscover the sense of wonder and natural drive to create that I had enjoyed as a child... I was making art that I truly believed in and which engaged me at the deepest level. "

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Two views of: Subway with Lighted Interior, 1974 Mixed media (wood, acrylic and enamel paint, masonite, incandescent light, fluorescent light fixture - unlit, cellulose compound, charcoal, graphite) 75" x 43" x 32" Collection of John and Thomas Solomon Photograph Courtesy of Bevan Davies

Coney: Night Maze, 1997-2009 Mixed media with sound 12’ 5” x 27’ x 19’ 4” Photograph Courtesy of Peter Mauss/ ESTO Photographics

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David Deutsch

" There was a new conversation in the ‘80s, that works of art could be interesting and original without being formalist “breakthroughs”, and I think it continues today. "

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Mirror Device and Hut, 1984 Acrylic, gouache and pumice on paper mounted on curved canvas 49 3/8" x 91 5/8" x 3 3/4"

Untitled, 2007 Acrylic and ink on paper 56" x 36" Photograph Courtesy of Bill Orcutt

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Martha Diamond

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Location, 1977 Oil on aluminum 36” x 24”

Cityscape with Red, 2005 Oil on linen 72” x 48”

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Hermine Ford

" I lived mostly among painters at a time when then (and forever) painting was declared dead…

We worked in a (briefly) post-politics (war, civil rights) post-pop, mid—minimalism/conceptualism, graffiti saturated, process and materials oriented, feminist- sensitized world. It was wide open."

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Untitled, 1976 Oil on canvas 30” x 51”

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Witness Tree, 2009 Oil paint, ink, watercolor, gouache, pencil and colored pencil on linen on shaped wood panel 95” x 47” x 3/4”

Mike Glier

" If you think of Bruce Nauman’s Green Light Corridor as a measuring device for the change in creative culture between 1975 and 2010, the first date is placed about half way through the corridor, the “feeling trapped” section, and the later date is at the end of the corridor, where diversity and potential are present, but accompanied by awareness that the rosy affects may only be temporary."

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Clubs of Virtue (Version Two), 1979, remade 1995 Enamel on wood Approximately 36" x 72" x 24” Courtesy of Gerald Peters Gallery, New York, NY

August 10, 2007: Mount Duval, Pangnirtung, Canada, 47ºF., 2009 Oil on aluminum panel, 40" x 50" Courtesy of Gerald Peters Gallery, NY Photograph Courtesy of Arthur Evans

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Lois Lane

" We all more or less knew one another and what we were working on, where we were showing...

It felt a lot like a very large family on a very large boat moving somewhere together. It sounds romantic, I know, but that's how I remember it. Now, for me, being an artist is showing what I can of the unconscious—out of the boat, into the ocean."

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Untitled, 1977 Oil and graphite on canvas 75” x 60” Collection of Miani Johnson

Untitled, 1984 Oil on canvas 72 x 96”

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Thomas Lawson

" I started publishing reviews in 1977, and looking back at them I wrote a lot about painting, fretting over its place in the cosmos. It was clearly a time of passionate commitments, and I wanted rigor and historical awareness and some sort of public/political upfrontness…I wanted some sort of engagement with the oppressive world of mass media imagery…"

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He Died Like His Many Innocent Victims, 1980 Oil on canvas with strip frame , 53”x 43”x 2” Courtesy of The Marieluise Hessel Collection, Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.

Boy With Hair on Fire, 2008 Oil on canvas, 72” x 30” Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Photograph courtesy of Siri Kaur

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Kim MacConnel

" The situation in the 1970’s was a period of intense conceptual experimentation by artists at all levels, but particularly by emerging artists playing around, literally, with what constituted an art work, or artistic activity, or what constituted a space, a show space, a living space.

Every activity was a questioning activity."

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Red Corner, 1978 Painted and sewn cloth strips 36 1/2” x 52 1/2”

4 Pattern Dub #1 and 4 Pattern Dub #4, 2009 Latex on canvas 23 1/2” x 23 1/2” Each

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This Not-so-Seventies Show

By Peter Plagens

The 1970s are edging in on being forty years old. In a living, breathing human being, that’s middle age, and in contemporary art, where the parent-to-progeny time span is about five years, that’s a couple of handfuls of generations. (If you’re talking Artforum covers, six months is closer to the mark.) But “the Seventies” sometimes seem as flat and distant as the Dust Bowl. Maybe they appear in retrospect that way to me because I spent them in Los Angeles, supporting my own painting teaching art to the hordes of once and future flower children who passed through a giant state university in a distant, ennui-laden suburb of Los Angeles that was, by political miracle or curse (your choice), actually within that city’s limits. The days were hot, the air opaque, the landscape banal, the market down, the galleries on the hip side of the Hollywood Hills dwindling, and a sense of the moment already being a footnote filled the lulling atmosphere. “The Sixties”—as manifested in the work of the light & space artists, the Hollywood pop guys, and the “fetish finish” obsessives (all those categories overlapped)—felt closer, more urgent. Even the New York 1960s (Warhol, Lichtenstein, et al.) appeared to most of us as sharp-focus foreground. Our own time lay in the background, fuzzed out by the smog of cultural epilogue.

There are, of course, other ways of looking at that benighted decade. As the art critic Doug Harvey writes: In the early 1970s, many artists became fed up with the overblown critical rhetoric surrounding post-painterly abstraction, a term coined by über-critic Clement Greenberg (as the title of a show at LACMA) for that work encompassing such non-Pop post–abstract expressionist painting styles as minimalism and Color Field. As the psychological, spiritual, figurative and narrative content was systematically removed from visual art during this period, the arguments in its defense became increasingly grandiloquent and elitist, and it was that, along with the cramped possibilities and ungenerous aesthetics of minimalist abstraction, that begat a reactionary torrent of works wallowing in sensuality, complexity, inclusiveness and humor.

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[“Pattern & Decoration, Pattern & Decoration, Pattern & Decoration,” LA Weekly, September 18, 2003] Or, the same sentiment in the looking-back gush of a press release: “Art in the seventies was distinguished by its pluralism. The 1960’s “isms” seemed played out; pop art, minimalism and conceptualism were established; media based work began to command art world attention only toward the end of the decade; and new painting, commonly labeled neo-expressionism, emerged only in the next decade. The situation was open.

Anything seemed possible.”

In the autumn of my years, I can see that both the antiheroic and heroic views of the Seventies have considerable truth to them. With Minimalism having passed into recent history as, in the words of the late John Coplans, “the last of the court styles” (i.e., any decent artist had to contend with it—accept it, reject it, but contend nevertheless) and photorealism, the avant-garde had finally been academicized. (A date?—how about the opening of a new campus of the formerly training-ground-for-Disney-animators and now academyfor-rebels, Cal Arts in 1970.) There wasn’t much of what the great dealer Irving Blum likes to call “a sense of urgency.” T’was the original “big chill”—stay cool, do what you want, lots of exhibiting artists teaching in art departments and art schools all over the place, pick up that MFA, detritus and theorizing about detritus make almost automatically decent shows, score a teaching job yourself, and maybe get lucky enough to grab one of those National Endowment for the Arts fellowships—government money directly to the artist, no strings!

Women artists were getting—on account of their own militancy and not some sudden male largesse—a better shot, but minority artists were still relatively scarce enough to give us white guys a creepy, subaudible feeling of being over-privileged. That in itself—spattered, long-haired makers of non-Rockwell/Remington sorts of art that still drew laughs and/or scorn in polite society feeling like they might be having it a little too easy—showed how far we had come since Jack Pollock pee’d in Peggy Guggenheim’s fireplace (or, for that matter, since Andy Warhol’s soup-can paintings went on view at the Ferus Gallery in 1962 and the gallery across the street putting a pyramid of actuals in its front window with a sign saying, “Get the real thing for 29 cents!”).

In a strange sort of way, the exclamation point put on the prolongated “death” of Abstract Expressionism by the suicide in 1970 of Mark Rothko also took some of the steam out of the momentum of Pop Art. As much as it was a reinsertion and militant celebration of “low” popular culture within the precincts of “high” art, Pop was also a refutation of the tortured, histrionic loner-genius of Abstract Expressionism, emotionally flailing away in his cold-water loft, expelling his existential soul onto the canvas in the most heated, physically direct way possible—“action painting.” Pop was passive-aggressively cool, deadpan, and dismissive of the idea that artists had to, as the psychologists say, “act out” in order to make art. On the West Coast, the quasi-Pop painter Billy Al Bengston had said that the time had come for artists in southern California to—if memory serves—wash their hands, put on clean trousers, throw off that San Francisco sensibility (i.e., the Abstract Expressionist heritage of Rothko and Clyfford Still, who’d taught briefly at what’s now the San Francisco Art Institute), and be professionals. By the time the Seventies rolled around, artists exchanging psychodrama for, to use the current academic buzzword, their “practice,” was no longer news. To oversimplify the situation, the most salient

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characteristic of the art world in the Seventies was that there was no longer much of anything to react against.

Artists may have been, as Harvey says, “fed up,” but they weren’t stylistically or critically oppressed. So they didn’t so much push back as spread out.

So I was looking at painting as a strategy and I thought of each painting as analogous to a very fast song by the Ramones, something like that, a very simple idea that could be executed very quickly with minimum fuss, minimum of tools, just done you know essentially in half an afternoon or something....

How did they spreadeth? Let us count [some of] the ways: In 1971, Chris Burden had himself shot in the upper arm by a .22 caliber rifle, and Robert Smithson created Spiral Jetty; in 1972, James Turrell started work on his Roden Crater project in Arizona and Michael Heizer did the same with his giant City earthwork in Nevada; in 1973, Dorothea Rockburne installed Drawing Which Makes Itself in the Bykert Gallery, and Al Ruppersberg delivered a lecture on Houdini while escaping from a straight jacket; in 1974, the art group Ant Farm installed Cadillac Ranch by the side of a highway outside of Amarillo, Texas, and Joseph Beuys performed I Like America and America Likes Me; and in 1975, Carolee Schneeman withdrew from her body, through her vagina, a scroll, and Howard Fried filmed himself taking a golf lesson in The Burghers of Fort Worth.

More recently I’ve moved back into the studio and begun to think of the work, not exactly a private enterprise, but an enterprise that has to do with thinking consistently through a set of problems and ideas without so much concern for public....

Meanwhile, chatter about “the death of painting”—which was presumed during the 1970s to have either deadended itself in great gray gridded abstractions, retrenched itself in achingly elaborate trompe-l’oeil (whose mosaic-like paint application was critically repackaged as computer-like “information”), or simply expanded into a branch of sculpture—reached a fever pitch...or, since hardly anything was fevered in the Seventies, a pitch, period.

The Seventies were, in short, a deceptively tough time to be an artist, especially an artist committed to the studio, to an unironic (which does not mean dour or dogmatic) approach to modernism, and to a certain human scale modesty, or at least an avoidance of too much hubris. And to maintain being an artist—let alone a serious artist—in the multiple art-world lifetimes that have passed before our eyes since the 1970s. The last thirty-five years or so have offered artists innumerable temptations to “tech it up,” to expand exponentially the physical product, to answer, in effect, the siren song of being glamorously and (inevitably) superficially “21st century.” And the carrot of temptation has carried with it a market corollary of the stick; as a painter-friend of mine in Los Angeles presciently said to me a long time ago, “It’s easier for a dealer to find new artists for old clients, than new clients for old artists.”

Although their work has, as it naturally would, changed since the mid-1970s, none of the nine artists in this exhibition—Cynthia Carlson, Donna Dennis, David Deutsch, Martha Diamond, Hermine Ford, Mike Glier, Lois Lane, Thomas Lawson, Kim McConnell—has succumbed to the skew of temptation or the distortion of the stick. And although the work of none of these artists is what anybody would call arcane, a thread of, if not art-for-art’s-sake, at least art for the artists’ sake runs through this show. The spirit of all this is, not surprisingly, beautifully articulated by one of them, the painter Thomas Lawson. In a lecture that was published in 2006,* Lawson said (and I’ve taken the liberty of condensing part of it to what’s really pertinent here):

...the significance of having a studio or not having a studio. To me it’s absolutely crucial, I don’t actually any longer understand how you work without one.

If you understand the shift in empathy from Picasso to Duchamp and back again, and read “studio” as a state of mind rather than just a physical place, Lawson’s plainspoken ode to a kind of responsible, non-self-indulgent, interiority is clear. And that, to me, is the real subject of That Was Then, This Is Now.

Peter Plagens is a painter who's shown with the Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York City since 1974 and was also the staff art critic for Newsweek (1989-2003), where he is now Contributing Editor. He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Arts Journalism Program. Plagens is the author of two books of art criticism- Sunshine Muse: Art on the West Coast, 1945-70 (University of California Press, 2000) and Moonlight Blues: An Artist's Art Criticism (UMI Research Press, 1986)-as well as a novel, Time for Robo (Black Heron Press, 1999). He lives in New York City with his wife, the painter Laurie Fendrich.

*“GI Symposium: Painting as a New Medium,”ART&RESEARCH: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods, Volume 1.

No. 1. Winter 2006/07

I found that what I wanted to look at was actually this painting of Picasso (Green Still Life). And the surrealist rooms, which are now expanded and dominating because in all those years since 1975 art has very clearly taken the side of Duchamp and I found that I was really sick of that...

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Painting/Writing/History

By Martha Schwendener

this framework, photography and film were privileged; sculpture was seen as ranging into an “expanded field; ” painting wasn’t granted the same passport. And yet, a teleological criticism persisted which relied on models of technological progress, so that painting was posed as “regressive and humanist,” instead of critical postmodernism.8 But if painting was used as a pawn in the writing wars, it could also be used for dividing history. Abstract painting was the emblem of modernism. Reinhardt’s “last paintings” were built on a linear conception of history, but postmodern theories were bent on breaking historicism. Saying that the end had come meant giving in “to a historicist conception of history as both linear and total (i.e., one cannot paint after Duchamp, Rodchenko, Mondrian; their work has rendered paintings unnecessary).”9 But did historicism die with modernism? Is it true, as Barthes claimed that, “To be modern is to know that which is not possible any more”? Or was modernism simply a Western and Eurocentric notion? 10 At the present moment, historical categories themselves are under siege; time itself is under construction. What is the present moment? Are we living in the “altermodern”11 or should we acknowledge the coexistence of distinct senses of time occurring in different fields and regions that might be grouped under the rubric “contemporaneity?”12

Painting’s recent adversaries are well known. First came photography. “You know exactly what I think of photography,” Marcel Duchamp wrote to Alfred Stieglitz. “I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable.”1 But Duchamp’s readymades were an equally potent threat, as well as the idea that a certain narrative of painting couldn’t be sustained. Ad Reinhardt declared his black canvases “the last paintings which anyone can make.” Robert Ryman’s white paintings posed a similar impasse.

Attempts to revive painting in the 1970s were framed as pathological: “hysterical”; “a tantrum, shrieking and sputtering that the end of painting has not come.”2 The return of figurative painting seemed positively dangerous, highlighting the “intricate connection between aesthetic mastery and authoritarian domination.”3 By the millennium, it wasn’t just painting that was suspect, but all mediums. Pluralism had disallowed the primacy of any one medium, but now it was declared that, “we inhabit a post-medium condition.”4 Painting never died, of course. In the 1970s, however, innovations were coming from different sources. “It’s very strange that the history of painting could be thought to end just as women were beginning to make their contributions,” one artist commented, while another added that, “‘white’ people … to whom art had belonged got to end the narrative before anyone else could get their foot in the door.”5 Unless, of course, it wasn’t so much an argument about painting as an argument over how to write about painting: A crisis presenting itself in the form of a discourse, which later bloomed into a full blown “crisis in criticism.”6 Or, perhaps following Roland Barthes’ edict, readers were displacing writers and critics were displacing painters. It’s also been suggested that this argument was happening primarily in New York; Europe had lived through this cataclysm in the 60s.7 The American argument for the death of painting grew out of the formalism of Clement Greenberg, but the argument put forward by his heirs was against Greenberg’s “positivist” art criticism. Theory, the one-word figurehead for a cluster of ideas largely imported from Europe, was adopted by younger critics. (Although, as more than one writer has pointed out, by the time “theory” reached American shores, a wildly heterogeneous range of thinkers were fused under a single heading.) Within

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Painting’s ontology has changed, too. In 1890 Maurice Denis stated, “It is well to remember that a picture – before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote – is essentially a plane surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.” The 60s and 70s exploded painting’s “natural limits”: the dimensions of the canvas, the oppositions between abstraction and representation (signaled most famously, perhaps, by Philip Guston).

It has been suggested that painting’s virtue might be its “impurity,” its ease at absorbing multiple belief systems, technologies, and other mediums and forms: performance, architecture, film, photography, dance, sculpture, and installation. Mechanical reproduction, which was initially seen to hark the demise of painting has served instead as a “vampire’s kiss” that made painting “immortal.”13 (It also drove the development of abstraction.) Painting might be seen as responding to a certain group of ideas that were called “painting” and now are something else.

And yet, two problems remain, inherited from the 70s and 80s: One, that painting was absorbed into museums, since alternative spaces were the homes for radical art forms; and two, that painting remains an art-market staple.

In the early 80s, it was suggested that painting was the perfect camouflage for critical thinking, a “subversive method” that would allow one “to place critical aesthetic activity at the center of the marketplace, where it can cause the most trouble.”14 This position was critiqued more than it was supported. And attempts to suggest that recent painting has escaped the “reification trap” by inventing forms and structures similar to digital networks, that “suture spectators to extra-perceptual social networks rather than merely situating them in a phenomenological relationship of individual perception”15 seem equally problematic - particularly since the “social network” described is still a gallery located within the art market system.

More important, what does it mean when the primary indicator of a work’s value is its ability to challenge or outwit institutions and market structures – when the conditions surrounding the work are often more sophisticated than the work itself? In the early 80s, concern over art’s rise in marketability produced this kind of pessimism and concern: “If the workings of the art marketplace demonstrate anything at all, it is its capacity to assimilate, absorb, neutralize and commodify virtually any practice at all.”16 Now these ideas have ossified into a nihilist orthodoxy where “the ultimate master of détournement turns out to be capitalism itself, which can appropriate and reprogram anything to serve its own ends.”17

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We could follow the claim of Hegelian exhaustion in which painting – and art itself – has collapsed into a form of philosophy, or succumbed to market irrelevance. Recent writers have suggested that Hegel did not predict an end to art, however, but rather an end to “the dream of its purity” and autonomy.18 Even political theorists who offer sobering analyses of globalization and the post-Cold War geopolitical landscape do not foreclose on art’s ability to give us the conceptual means to invent other possibilities, making what had once seemed utterly impossibly “entirely realistic.”19

to architecture, but represents it in two dimensions. Lois Lane has continued the conversation started by gestural abstractionists in the midcentury – but also made black paintings that challenge the notion that Reinhardt’s black canvases were the “last paintings” anyone could make. Similarly, Hermoine Ford comes out of the midcentury New York School tradition, extending its span into the 21st-century.

In the 1980s, Mike Glier confronted the idea that painting was the domain of the heroic male-artist-subject with his series of drawings and paintings titled “White Male Power”; more recently, he has made landscapes that collapse representation and figuration and are painted on aluminum. While Kim MacConnel was aligned with the 70s Pattern and Decoration movement, he has gone back to the early 20th-century to pit Picasso and Matisse against each other in colorful, abstract works that conflate their disparate approaches. David Deutsch has mined photography for his imagery, but through the filter of surveillance photography, which offers a particular set of concerns, from the perceptual to the political.

A more radical question than immanent foreclosure might be to challenge the assumption at the center of much neo-Marxist-informed postmodern criticism: Does capitalism really invade all areas of consciousness? Or is it, at this point, an inherently conservative claim that the only possibility for art to remain relevant is to resist commodification? Painters like Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, who straddled political and economic systems by moving from East to West Germany, have shown how painting might be a viable way to critique the primacy of any one system – and how painting could be a fluid agent, moving between systems. (And, in Richter’s case, by applying a diversified and self-effacing approach to painting itself, that painting can simultaneously coexist alongside juggernaut technologies like photography – and thrive, and offer its own self-critique.)20

And finally, Thomas Lawson, who penned one of the most pertinent American defenses of painting in the 1980s, “Last Exit: Painting.” In that 1981 essay he wrote, "Radical artists now are faced with a choice—despair, or the last exit: painting."25 Publishing the essay in a distinctly anti-painting climate was one act of defense. Not only did Lawson put painting “at the center” where it could cause “the most trouble,” but he included himself and his own, conceptually informed paintings, in the roster of artists waging that defense. It is only proper then, that he should be included in this exhibition and this conversation, in which painting, writing, and history converge.

Similarly, one might ask, is critical practice the only option for art, or just an extension of modernism’s demand for selfreflexive objects? Rather than adhering to old versions of artistic critique – say, nineteenth-century denunciation of bourgeois morality or, later, resisting reification – some have suggested that art could work to reformulate issues of liberation and authenticity,21 or that the prefix “post-”, which has been appended to practically every term in art’s sphere, be extended to criticism itself, so that we might enter a “post-critique” era of art.22 Painting allows for a complex, material reworking and rethinking of these issues. Even the most basic, traditional rendition, the “plane surface covered with colors,” allows us to reorient ourselves in time and space, to rethink our relation to representation – and, in a culture dominated by flat screens, our cognitive, perceptual, and even neurological relation to the “plane surface.” Painting remains “impure;” it resists, as Reinhardt demonstrated, truly accurate reproduction. It can be photographed, but unlike photography or film in the digital era, its materiality is substantially altered in the course of reproduction. In a decentralized, virtually-described world, it has physical components: a location, a body. It can exploit Duchamp’s detested “retinal” effects. But “retinal” itself has a new topology, thanks to neuroscience.

Martha Schwendener's criticism has been published in The New York Times, The Village Voice, Artforum, Bookforum, Art in America, The New Yorker, Time Out New York, Flash Art, and other publications. She studied art history at Columbia University and the City University of New York, Graduate Ce nter, and has taught at The Fashion Institute of Technology (SUNY), Hunter College (CUNY), the School of Visual Arts, the University of Texas at Austin, Rhode Island School of Design, and Tyler School of Art. 1. Quoted in Crimp, Douglas. “The End of Painting.” October 16. Cambridge, MIT Press, 1981. 75.

Painting and The Writing of Painting's Post-Crisis, Post-Critique Future.” Art Lies.

Summer 2005.

For those still clinging to criticality, painting might serve as a particular seat of resistance. Because, in a world defined by movement and speed – fast hard drives, global migrations - slowing down might be the most radical act of all. Painting offers the opportunity for prolonged looking23 and the recuperation of pleasure; the destabilizing jouissance or bliss that got virtually stripped away as Barthes’ writing made its way into the Anglo world.

2. Crimp, 82.

7. See Jean Clay’s essay “La peinture est finie” in 1967 and Isabelle Graw and Yve-Alain Bois quoted in “The Mourning After.”

The critical gesture might be to resist the “negative theology” outlining what’s permissible in painting and what’s not.24 To treat criticism itself as a sort of informe. To register eruptions, from modernism to “bad painting” to Henry Darger and “Thrift Store Paintings.” In this contested historical age, to let painting be an act of sustained and engaged viewing, and to let it

4. Krauss, Rosalind. A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the PostMedium Condition. London: Thames & Hudson, 1999. 32.

occupy as many fields as possible.

The artists in “That is Then. This is Now” have explored painting both in an expanded field and extended time frame. Cynthia Carlson has worked in painting, installation, and the public art realm. Donna Dennis might just as easily be described as a sculptor who explores architecture – although she is represented here as a painter. Martha Diamond similarly looks

30

3. Buchloh, Benjamin H.D. “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting.” October 16. Cambridge, MIT Press, 1981. 46 .

5. David Reed quoted in “The Mourning After – Panel Discussion.” Artforum, March 2003; Monique Prieto quoted in “Thick and Thin – Painters and curators discuss the state of painting in the last two decades,” Artforum, April 2003.

6. Miles, Christopher. “The Death of

12. Smith, Terry. Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity. xv. Also see October 130. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009.

18. Rancière, Jacques. The Future of the Image. London; New York: Verso, 2007. 89.

13. Reed, “The Mourning After.”

20. Gaiger, Jason. “Post-conceptual painting: Gerhard Richter’s extended leave taking.” Themes in Contemporary Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.

8. Siegel, Katy. High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting, 1967-1975. Edited

by Katy Siegel. New York: Independent Curators International, 2006. 86-87.

14. Lawson, Thomas. “Last Exit: Painting.”

Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation. Edited by Brian Wallis.

New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984. 163-64. (Originally published in Artforum, October 1981.)

9. Bois, Yve-Alain. Painting as Model.

Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990. 241.

15. Joselit, David. “Painting Beside Itself.”

October 130, Fall 2009. 132.

10. Negri, Antonio. “Contemporaneity between Modernity and Postmodernity.” In Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity. 24.

16. Solomon-Godeau, Abigail.

“Photography After Art Photography.”

Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation. The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984. 81.

11. Bourriaud, Nicolas, Ed. Altermodern : Tate Triennial. London: Tate Publications/ New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2009.

31

17. Krauss, 33.

19. Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio.

Artforum. October 2009, 178.

21. Boltanski, Luc and Chiapello, Eve. The New Spirit of Capitalism. London; New York: Verso, 2005, 469.

22. Miles, “The Death of Painting and The Writing of Painting's Post-Crisis, PostCritique Future.”

23. Lane Relyea quoted in “Thick and Thin,” Artforum, April 2003.

24. Terry Winters, Ibid.

25. Lawson, 164.

Decorative Contemporary

By Emily Warner

Pattern and Decoration has been called the last modernist movement and the first postmodern, a final hurrah in the chapters of avant-garde rebellion and a new front in the pluralist free-for-all of the 1970s. Certainly the movement was multiple, divergent, even contradictory in its manifestations: under its umbrella it gathered abstraction, figurative flourishes, gridded designs, riotous arabesques. Anything and everything outside the borders of the austere status quo—outside of that formal and expansive “Athene” that Clement Greenberg sought in his vision of high modernism: it’s not folk art, he famously asserted, not mass production, but “Athene whom we want: formal culture with its infinity of aspects, its luxuriance, its large comprehension.” 1 The Athena quote appears as one of many collaged together in Joyce Kozloff and Valerie Jaudon’s 1978 “Art Hysterical Notions of Progress and Culture,” a manifesto-like essay for feminist art and its craft-based movements.2 The essay’s contention, that the biases of gender and race deeply inflect the dominant narratives written about culture, is well captured in Greenberg’s vision of Athena. For it is this Athena, understood in her various guises—Eurocentric culture, high art, the negative purity of abstraction—that so much of Pattern and Decoration has aimed at undoing. What might the marginal and the decorative, P&D asks, the frippery sheared from Athena’s edges, offer by way of alternative? How might the surfeit of extras repeatedly refused by fine art capture a richer and more varied meaning—both in P&D’s initial instances, and today, in present practice?

Since the 70s, of course, Athena’s hegemony has been repeatedly contested. This has made P&D’s own grumble with modernist orthodoxy somewhat more elusive. If Pattern and Decoration was a breath of fresh air in the stale space of an over-serious art world, as its early supporters maintained, what do we make of it today, when color, freshness, and insouciant critique are the norm? Some have deemed P&D an essential break—a decisively important “first”—in the opening of the floodgates. 3 I am more interested here, however, in the particular strategies that P&D employed in its assault. What of its various manners and impulses—the proliferating scrawl of the decorative, the tacky glee of visual excess, the psychological or political freight 32

vested in materials? Where, on the contemporary scene, do such concerns with interface and surface, with the thingness of objects and the heightened spaces between them, crop up in newly generative ways? In dwelling on a few of P&D’s salient impulses, and noting their permutations in present practice, I offer neither a full summary of the movement, nor a cast of contemporary heirs. (Indeed, the artists and works discussed vary greatly in style and ideological commitment.) Rather, I hope to elucidate a few specific themes that informed P&D, and that continue, with or without the specter of Athena as counter weight, to be fruitful modes of artistic investigation.

Proliferation More than the grid per se, it is proliferation, the sprawling continuation of motif, that underlies the P&D decorative. Equally apparent in the tightly patterned knots of Valerie Jaudon’s canvases and the messier, looping strokes of Robert Zakanitch’s paintings, such spreading motifs take over surfaces and objects with a cheerful disregard for variations in medium or function. In Kim MacConnel’s fabric works, like the 1978 Red Corner, strokes of paint wiggle themselves across underlying patterns, so that a blue flower print is limned with gestural curlicues and the outlines of jaunty, cartoonish peonies.

In the wallpapers of contemporary artist Virgil Marti, patterned images extend their reach across entire room interiors. As in Cynthia Carlson’s rooms of the 1980s, patterning erupts everywhere: on the walls, along decorative objects, on hung pictures. In Marti’s VIP Room (2010), a slowly turning disco ball sends a pale, lightrefracted wobble across the patterned silver wallpaper, while at night blacklights illuminate a neon-colored landscape lurking in the paper’s printed fluorescent ink.

This propensity for multiplication—for a spreading-beyond-the-borders—goes a long way to distinguishing the decorative from its more staid and serious counterparts in abstraction. Artist Polly Apfelbaum’s floor pieces, flat fabric swatches clustering in corners or spilling out from wall bases, speak to the same kind of proliferating drive, overtaking even the floor we walk on.

Excess Proliferation shades easily into abundance and profusion: the decorative likes to revel in its gaudiness, its overthe-top-ness. If Apfelbaum’s floor pieces hint at such a direction, her more recent monoprints, neon flowers and dots closely printed on giant sheets of paper, celebrate it. You can lose yourself in the deeply saturated colors of her monochrome flowers, each perfect and pokey as a Volkswagen decal. The excessiveness has both a high and low register: the impressions cut deeply, seductively, into the weave of the handmade paper, even as they evoke the tacky sheen of vinyl shower curtains.

Excess is something the original P&D artists excelled at. Miriam Schapiro’s mixed-media works, with their dazzling pile-up of endless flower motifs, cubes, and fabric shreds, stun the eye in their profusion of detail.

Robert Zakanitch’s large paintings, like his famous wall-size Bungalow Suite series (1990-94), envelop the viewer in feet upon feet of swooping paint strokes.

Contemporary artist Catherine Lan’s mixed-media canvases, trussed up in fuzz and puckered silk, put a subtly unnerving spin on the tacky glee of Zakanitch and Apfelbaum. The glut of textural materials in her works (lace, 33

fabric, glitter, spray paint) suggests layers of female masquerade and fantasy. Art historian Norma Broude, in an essay on Pattern and Decoration, deemed the decorative “abstraction’s ‘other,’” and there is something convincing about this when looking at Lan’s works: the patterns are formally beautiful, but constituted from such pop debris as twinkling rhinestones and pasted fur balls. 4 Everything that abstraction might aim for, but in a lovingly vulgar vocabulary.

Interface Brimmed in faux fur and felt, Lan’s canvases can feel like living personas. P&D teems with such quasi-animate entities. In Cynthia Carlson’s 1975 Triple Buldges, bulbs of canvas, hardened into place with coats of paint, suggest rows of peering eyeballs. A Jane Kaufman work from 1984, 4-Panel Screen, stands six and a half feet tall, its black, feather-coated panels intimating the curved back of a giant insect. Like the hanging fabrics of other P&D artists, Kaufman’s standing screen acts as a marker between spaces: with its slight concave bulge, it almost seems to breathe, separating outside from inside, surface from interior.

This play between thing and interface, between sculpted object and an object that sculpts its environment, continues in a variety of contemporary works that sit, like Carlson’s Buldges, somewhere between painting and sculpture. The shaped canvases and constructions of such artists as Jim Lee, Ian Pedigo, and Justin Adian burble personality traits (feisty, loveable, uncanny, weird), at the same time they tinker with the space around them: misshapen ovals with crackled surfaces suggest mirrors or voids, leaning stretcher bars and puffed-up limbs carve frames and portals against the gallery wall.

This interest in the mediating potential of objects informs many of P&D’s “usable” and architectural works. The wearable fabrics of Robert Kushner’s Chador series, or the edible clothing from his 1972 performances, impart new skins to their wearers, or, when hung on the wall, hint at the enlivening power of costume. Donna Dennis’s mini hotel fronts and subway entrances from the 1970s engage similar themes of threshold and façade. Perkily arranged (in some 1970s exhibitions with fake palm trees), the shacks and house fronts offer shallow porches and entrances that lead to nowhere.

Material Perhaps the most characteristic impulse of Pattern and Decoration is its attitude toward material. Robert Zakanitch, for one, rooted his decorative practice in childhood memories of material ornamentation, noting, “In my grandparents’ house, ornamentation was everywhere. They had embroidered tablecloths and armrests.

They used stencils to paint flower patterns on their walls…[they] decorated everything.” In addition to being liberal, even decadent, in the diversity of its materials, P&D was deeply invested in their metaphorical layers, in the cultural and political nuances that specific media might encode. Miriam Shapiro’s quilts and pasted fabrics originated as an attempt to incorporate the anonymous craftwork of women, to recover and engage with a female history of “sewing, piecing, hooking, cutting, appliquéing, cooking, and the like.”

Like Schapiro, contemporary artist Jessica Jackson Hutchins utilizes materials with distinct evocations of the domestic. Her constructions, with clay figures on faded sofas, or plaster-caked rocking horses, focus less 34

on the repetitive gestures of traditional “women’s work” than on the detritus of home- and art-making. The assemblage Convivium, from 2008, covers a table with a network of papier-mache tubes, sprouting like growths from the table edges and offering small platforms for bumpy clay vessels. In his Plate Convergence projects, contemporary artist Theaster Gates uses ceramic plate ware as material conveyors for Black and Japanese cultural traditions. Making and using the vessels, in dinner gatherings and performances, becomes a way not only to recover lost handiwork and ritual but to craft eclectic contemporary mixtures. In both Hutchins and Gates, material intersects potently with the relational, with the ephemeral webs of eating, gathering, crafting, historytelling. Material as metaphor—with its textural grain and its infinite capacity for difference—is one of P&D’s most potent legacies.

In many ways, the most significant lessons of P&D involve strategies for making things messy—for roughing up the edges and troubling neat distinctions. This is done, then as now, through recourse to the particular: to the bumpiness of layered media, to materials with their own histories, to things rather than ideas. Those distinctions that P&D trained its sites at and sought to bring down—distinctions between serious and unserious, pure and kitschy, patriarchal and marginal—have proved far more infinite than the dualisms of modernism ever suggested.

Today’s artists work within and across the variegated interstices of race, gender, sexuality, painterliness and mass culture, local and global, the many shades between synthesis, celebration, and critique.

P&D’s real contribution lies not in the conceptual messages derived from it, but in the specific ways it gave material form to such concepts. I have attempted to outline a few of these above. Proliferation, excess, interface, and the metaphorical weight of material continue to be viable modes today, beyond the modernist horizon. The decorative was, and is, a way not to replace one canon with another, but to insist on the multiplicity and divergence of contemporary experience. It is a way of uncovering Athena in the details, of declaring that luxuriance and large comprehension (along with narrowness, ignorance, glee, anger, memory, et al) dwell not in the universal but in the personal and the particular.

Emily Warner is a writer living in Philadelphia, PA. She was a participant of CUE and AICA’s Young Art Critic Mentoring Program, for which she wrote on the 2009 exhibition Clark V. Fox. Her work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Artcritical. com, NYFA Current, and Proximity Magazine, and she writes regularly on New York and Philadelphia exhibitions. She is currently pursuing a graduate degree in art history.

1. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” [1939] reprinted in Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, ed.

Francis Frascina (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 21-34; 32 n5.

2. Valerie Jaudon and Joyce Kozloff, “Art Hysterical Notions of Progress and Culture,” Heresies 1:4 (Winter 1977-8), 38-42. Reprinted in Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, ed., Theories and Documents

of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings (Berkeley: University of California, 1996), 154-64.

3. Artist Robert Zakanitch, for example, has noted, “without P&D, there would be no postmodern.” Quoted in Anne Swartz, “Pattern and Decoration: An Ideal Vision in American Art” in Swarz, ed., Pattern and Decoration: An Ideal Vision in American Art, 1975-1985, 12-42

35

(Yonkers, NY: Hudson River Museum, 2007), 23.

4. Somewhat more measuredly, Holland Cotter noted P&D’s importance in “bring[ing] down the great Western Minimalist wall for a while and bring[ing] the rest of the world in. Let the art historical record show, in the postmovement future, the continuing debt we owe it for that.” See Holland

Cotter, “Scaling a Minimalist Wall with Bright, Shiny Colors,” New York Times (January 15, 2008), E1.

See Norma Broude, “The Pattern and Decoration Movement” in The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, ed.

Broude and Mary D. Garrard, 208-225 (New York: Abrams, 1996), 208.

Biographies C YNTHIA CARLSON was born in Chicago. She received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a MFA from Pratt Institute. Solo museum exhibitions include the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, NY; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY; the University of Miami: Lowe Art Museum; Milwaukee Art Museum; Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, NY; Allen Memorial Art Museum in Oberlin, OH; and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Solo exhibitions include New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, Colorado, and New Orleans. Group exhibits include the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Artists Space, the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, MA, Brooklyn Museum, MoMA PS1, the Hayden Gallery at MIT in Cambridge, MA, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Art Institute of Chicago. Works in public collections include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of Art in Philadelphia, PA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, IL, the Denver Art Museum, and the Princeton Museum of Art. Commissions include the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia, and the Los Angeles County Metro Rail System.

She has received numerous grants including five National Endowment for the Arts Grants and the Rockefeller Foundation Residency Award in Bellagio, Italy. She taught at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and Queens College, CUNY. DONNA DENNIS was born in Springfield, OH in 1942 and grew up outside of New York. She received her BA from Carleton College, Northfield, MN. She started as a painter, but is best known for her complex sculptural installations that draw inspiration from vernacular architecture, both urban and rural. BLUE BRIDGE/red shift, a 24-foot long evocation of railway drawbridges was exhibited at SculptureCenter in New York in 1993 and her subway-inspired Deep Station filled the lobby of the Brooklyn Museum in 1987 and traveled to the Delaware Art Museum, the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art and the Indianapolis Museum of Art. In 2007, her Tourist Cabins on Park Avenue was exhibited on Park Avenue in New York. Her work is included in Phaidon Press Sculpture Today overviewing developments in sculpture worldwide from the past forty years. In 2004, her work 36

was included in the international survey, Architecture & Arts 1900 2000, Genoa, Italy. Her work resides in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, The Cleveland Museum of Art, the Microsoft Art Collection, the Walker Art Center, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Neuberger Museum of Art and many others. She has completed several permanent art commissions including ones at John F. Kennedy Airport and P.S. 234 in New York. She is the recipient of grants and awards including four National Endowment Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship and three Pollock-Krasner Foundation grants. She is Professor of Art at Purchase College, SUNY and lives in New York City.

Born in 1943 in Los Angeles, DAVID DEUTSCH studied at the University of California, Los Angeles and the California Institute of Arts, Chouinard. In 1970, he moved to New York City where he currently lives and works. He has been represented by a number of New York City galleries, including Annina Nosei Gallery, Christine Burgin Gallery, Blum Helman Gallery and Gorney Bravin + Lee. Since 1969, he has exhibited nationally and internationally in numerous solo and group shows. His work is in the collections of many museums including the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Deutsch’s work has been reviewed in Art in America, Artnews, Artforum, Bomb, Interview, The New York Times, The New Yorker and Newsweek, among others. In 2004, Twin Palms Press published David Deutsch: Paintings/Photographs.

MARTHA DIAMOND was born and raised in New York City. She received her BA from Carleton College in Northfield, MN in 1964 and spent the following year in Paris. She returned to New York in 1965 and received an MA from New York University in 1969. She has been based in New York ever since, with interludes on the Maine coast, in rural Vermont, and in the Catskills. During this time she has had solo shows in New York at the Robert Miller Gallery, the Brooke Alexander Gallery and the New York Studio School. She had solo shows at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and the Portland Museum of Art in Maine. She has participated in group shows in such places as the American Academy of Arts and Letters (which honored her with an Academy Award in 2001), the Brooklyn Museum, the Detroit Institute

of Arts, Harvard University, the Kuznetsky Most Exhibition Hall in Moscow, and the Whitney Museum of American Art (which included her in its 1989 Biennial), Her work is in permanent collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Brooklyn Museum, the Fogg Museum at Harvard, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Staatliche Museum in Berlin, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has taught at Cooper Union, Harvard University, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

HERMINE FORD was born in Manhattan and grew up on East 23rd Street. Her childhood neighborhood went from there down 2nd Avenue to Houston Street and points east. Her first access to the green world came in New Jersey summer camps via the local Settlement House.

In the years since, she has spent long periods of time in relatively uninhabited spaces on the Atlantic seaboard, and also long visits to Rome. Mostly she lives and works in New York City and Nova Scotia.

Solo exhibitions in New York include Artists Space, two shows with Barbara Toll Gallery, and Grant Selwyn Fine Art; and nationally at Goya Girl Press in Baltimore, with John Newman at Plattsburgh State Art Museum in New York, with Don Christianson at Bronx River Arts Center, and with John Newman and R. M. Fisher in Old Dogs New Tricks at KS Art in New York. Among many group shows: American Painting: The Eighties curated by Barbara Rose, Apex Art curated

by Mary Heilmann; ExitArt curated by Elizabeth Murray, and the Invitational Exhibition for Visual Arts at the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She received a New York State Creative Artist Service Program Grant in 1977. Her work also resides in numerous public collections.

Born in Kentucky, MIKE GLIER studied at Williams College before attending the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. An advisee of Robert Morris, Glier received an MA from Hunter College in 1975. From 1978 to 1984 he was an active member of the artist group, Collaborative Projects. Solo exhibitions of Glier’s drawing and painting have been presented at a variety venues including The Kitchen, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, San Jose Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art. A ten-year survey of his work was mounted at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center in Buffalo, NY in 1988. He participated in many exhibitions with Group Material including Resistance, The Constitution, Politics, and AIDS Timeline. The Drawing Center in New York and The Tyler Gallery, Temple University have sponsored national touring shows of his paintings. In the late 80’s, Glier moved to New England to begin 37

a teaching career at Williams College, which he considers part of his creative output. In 1989 he was the New England recipient of Awards in the Visual Arts 9, and in 1996 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in painting. In 2004, Town Green, a wall drawing installation for the Cambridge, MA City Hall Annex was selected by Americans for the Arts as one of the best public art works of the year. Along a Long Line, an account of a painting journey from the Arctic to the equator was published in 2009 by Hard Press Editions.

LOIS L ANE was born in Philadelphia in 1948. As a child she enjoyed drawing on black scratch pads and chose black poster board for all school projects. Her absorption with dark materials continues to this day. She studied at the Philadelphia College of Art and Yale University.

She has exhibited in New York at The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, Willard Gallery, Barbara Mathes Gallery, Barbara Toll Gallery, and nationally at The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center – Vassar College, Hood Museum of Art – Dartmouth College, John Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco and Pace Graphics & Design in Kentwood, MI. Her works are included in the collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Akron Art Institute, The-Albright Knox Art Gallery, The Broad Art Foundation, and The Philadelphia Museum of Art. She and her husband live in the Hudson Valley with their three dogs.

THOMAS L AWSON was born in Glasgow, Scotland and moved to New York City in the summer of 1975. He is an artist with a diverse, project-driven output whose interests and compulsions circle back through painting and writing. He has shown paintings in private galleries and public museums around the world, in solo shows, group exhibitions, and two mid-career surveys. He has created temporary public works, from New York City to Newcastle, Glasgow to Madrid.

His essays have appeared in various art journals such as Afterall, Artforum, Flash Art and October, as well as numerous exhibition catalogues. From 1979 until 1992 he, along with Susan Morgan, published and edited REAL LIFE Magazine. Between 2002 and 2009 he was co-editor of Afterall, and is now launching a new, web-based publishing venture, www.eastofborneo.org, which will attempt a non-hierarchical editorial structure as it examines contemporary art made in, and as seen from, Los Angeles. He has organized and selected many exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, London and Edinburgh.

He has been Dean of the Art School at CalArts since 1991. A book of selected writings, Mining for Gold, was published by JRP-Ringier, Zurich in 2004, and an anthology of REAL LIFE Magazine, was

published by Primary Information, in 2007. In 2009, early paintings were included in historical survey shows of the 80’s at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Magasin in Grenoble. He is a recent Guggenheim Fellow, and has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts and from several private foundations. For more information please visit www.thomaslawson.com KIM MCCONNEL has had several solo exhibitions including: Decorations, University of California, San Diego; Collection Applied Design, La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, CA; Third World Series, Matrix Gallery, University of California, Berkeley; China Trade Leisure Traffic, Galerie Bischofberger, Zurich, Switzerland; Thunderbomb, Galerie Rudolf Zwirner, Cologne, Germany; Luft Geshaften, James Corcoran Gallery, Los Angeles; Decoc Terrae Africano, Aspen Art Museum; Hotel Beauregard, Holly Solomon Gallery, NY; Bull Story, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Stairway of the Ancients, Casa de la Cultura, Tijuana, Mexico; Age of Plastic, Holly Solomon Gallery, NY; Postcards form India, Quint Gallery, La Jolla, CA; Fifty Views of Fuji, Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery, University of Nevada at Las Vegas; Arabia Felix and New China, Four Pattern Dub, Rate of Exchange and Woman with Mirror, Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Santa Monica, CA. MacConnel is represented by Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Santa Monica, and Quint Contemporary Art, La Jolla, CA and was previously represented by Holly Solomon Gallery, New York. His work was included in The Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial Exhibitions in 1975, 1977, 1979, 1981, and 1985; The Museum of Modern Art's An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture and The Venice Biennale in 1984. The Santa Monica Museum of Art hosted Parrot Talk: A Retrospective of Works by Kim MacConnel in 2003. Collection Applied Design (a retrospective) opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego October 2010.

DR. IRVING SANDLER is an art critic and historian who is Professor Emeritus of Art History at The State University of New York. He is a Contributing Editor of Art in America. Dr. Sandler is the author of numerous publications including four surveys of art since World War II: The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (Harper & Row, 1976), The New York School: Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties (Icon, 1989), American Art of the 1960s (HarperCollins Publishers, 1989), Art of the Postmodern Era: From the late 1960s to the Early 1990s (Westview Press, 1997). He has also written A Sweeper-Up After Artists: A Memoir (Thames & Hudson, February 9, 2009); From Avant-Garde to Pluralism: An On-The-Spot History (Hard Press Editions, 2006), and Abstract Expressionism and the American 38

Experience: A Reevaluation (Hudson Hills Press LLC, 2009), as well as monographs on Alex Katz, Al Held and Mark di Suvero, among others.

He is a former president and current board member of the United States Section of the International Association of Art Critics. He was the Director of the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, NY, and a co-founder of Artists Space in New York City. In 2008, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Art Criticism from the International Association of Art Critics.

ROBERT STORR is an artist, critic, curator. In 2006 he was appointed Professor of Painting and Dean of the School of Art at Yale University.

Mr. Storr received a B.A. from Swarthmore College in 1972 and an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1978. He was curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from 1990 to 2002. In 2002 Mr. Storr was named the first Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Mr. Storr has taught at CUNY, the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies, Rhode Island School of Design, Tyler School of Art, New York Studio School, and Harvard University.

He lectures frequently in this country and abroad. He has been a contributing editor at Art in America since 1981 and writes frequently for Artforum, Parkett, Art Press (Paris), and Frieze (London). He has also written numerous catalogs, articles, and books. Among his many honors he has received a Penny McCall Foundation Grant for painting, a Norton Family Foundation Curator Grant, and honorary doctorates from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Maine College of Art and Lyme Academy. His awards include the American Chapter of the International Association of Art Critics, a special AICA award for Distinguished Contribution to the Field of Art Criticism, an ICI Agnes Gund Curatorial Award, and the Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for Scholarly Excellence in the Field of American Art History from the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art. In 2000 the French Ministry of Culture presented him with the medal of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. He is currently Consulting Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. and in 2007 was chosen commissioner of the 2007 Venice Biennale, the first American invited to assume that position.

CUE Art Foundation’s operations and programs are made possible with the generous support of foundations, corporations, government agencies, individuals, and its members.

MAJOR PROGRAM SUPPORT IS PROVIDED BY:

MEDIA SPONSOR:

Accademia Charitable Foundation The Viking Foundation Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro The Pollock-Krasner Foundation The Greenwall Foundation The Greenwich Collection Ltd. The Hyde and Watson Foundation Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation Foundation for Contemporary Arts The Joan Mitchell Foundation The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts National Endowment for the Arts New York City Department of Cultural Affairs New York State Council on the Arts (a State agency) William Talbot Hillman Foundation The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Trust 39

CUE Art Foundation is a 501 (c)(3) non-profit forum for contemporary art

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

CUE FELLOWS

Gregory Amenoff

Gregory Amenoff

and cultural exchange that provides opportunities and resources for under-recognized artists. We value the astonishing diversity of creativity that artists provide and the importance of their activity in the social context of the city.

Theodore S. Berger

Polly Apfelbaum

Patricia Caesar

Theodore S. Berger, Chair

Thomas G. Devine

Ian Cooper

Thomas K.Y. Hsu

William Corbett

Vivian Kuan

Eleanor Heartney

Corina Larkin

Deborah Kass

Jan Rothschild

Corina Larkin

CUE provides artists, students, scholars and art professionals resources at many stages of their careers and creative lives. Our programs include exhibitions, publications, professional development seminars, educational outreach, symposia, readings and performances. Since 2002, we have operated from our 4,500 square foot storefront venue in the heart of New York’s Chelsea Arts District.

Brian D. Starer

Jonathan Lethem

CUE exhibiting artists are achosen by their peers who are themselves selected by a rotating advisory council from across the country. This pluralistic process ensures that CUE consistently offers diverse viewpoints from multiple disciplines of artistic practice.

Rossana Martinez Juan SĂĄnc hez

CURATORIAL ADVISOR Y COUNCIL Gregory Amenoff Bill Berkson

Irving Sandler, Senior Fellow Carolyn Somers Lilly Wei

William Corbett Michelle Grabner

STAFF

Jonathan Lethem

Executive Director

Lari Pittman

Jeremy Adams

Thomas Roma Marjorie Welish

Development Director Marni Corbett Programs Director Beatrice Wolert-Weese

ISBN: 978-0-9843122-3-8

Programs Coordinator

CATALOG DESIGN: ELIZABETH ELLIS

Simply put, we give artists their CUE

Ryan Thomas

PRINTED BY: MAR+X MYLES INC.

to take center stage in the challenging world of art.

Development Coordinator Talia Spetter

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