2009 Todd Levin:
"YOUR GOLD TEETH II
Curated by Todd Levin
June 19 – August 15, 2009
Opening reception June 18, 2009 6-8pm
jãnis AVOTIŅŠ jean-michel BASQUIAT alexandra BIRCKEN alighiero e. BOETTI james CASTLE joseph CORNELL thea DJORDJADZE leonardo DREW robert ELFGEN roe ETHRIDGE peter FISCHLI/david WEISS melissa GORDON Rodney GRAHAM hannah GREELY rashawn GRIFFIN françoise GROSSEN david HAMMONS jay HEIKES mary HEILMANN barkley l. HENDRICKS diane ITTER sergej JENSEN titus KAPHAR marvin LIPOFSKY john MCQUEEN ed MOULTHROP bruce NAUMAN cady NOLAND william j. O'BRIEN george OHR demetrius OLIVER yoko ONO paul OUTERBRIDGE steven PARRINO ed ROSSBACH sterling RUBY anj SMITH shinique SMITH gert & uwe TOBIAS rosemarie TROCKEL peter VOULKOS franz WEST toots ZYNSKY
Curator Statement
For three years, starting in 1961 (the year I was born), the English literary critic A. Alvarez prepared a series of programs for BBC radio on the intellectual scene in America called "Under Pressure." In these broadcasts, various writers commented on the need for artists to create their own language. This is an extract of what poet Robert Lowell said to Alvarez: "Some artists have impatience with the prosaic, everyday things of life, that sort of whimsical patience that other people may have…they leap for the sublime…what one finds wrong with culture is the monotony of the sublime…Art is always done with both your hands…the artist finds new life in it and almost sheds their outer life.."
Whilst relistening to, and reflecting upon these radio programs recently, it became sadly apparent that facile irony had become one of the dominant philosophical stances of the art world, and that perhaps the artists and artwork I chose for inclusion in Your Gold Teeth II simply had to lay in wait until the Oligarch decade was over. Any artist can hide for a long time in the wilds of their own irony, never rising above the vegetation. But hipness, in the illicit art world sense, feels suddenly puerile, meaningless, a sham, another way of simply buying into the system. One is sick to death of all the posturing.
In contrast, within this group exhibition one senses that boundaries are being tested, and rules of art conduct are being subverted – not subverted where craft is cast aside in favor of studied simplicity such as in the recent Whitney Biennial and Unmonumental exhibitions, but subverted by craft itself. On the contrary, there is a 'muchness' to a great deal of the work in this exhibition. When the cultural bar has recently been lowered to the point of absurdity, the only revenge worthy of the name comes from reestablishing standards lost to laziness and expediency, putting into sharp relief the dreck that surrounds it.
So much of what one sees today is one-sided. Either it is cold and calculated, with a minimum of feeling, or it is a sloppy slum of terrifying emotion. Somewhere in the labyrinth the artists in this exhibition have found individual answers to this balancing act. To give this 'answer' in words is approachable, but ultimately impossible. What is involved is the union of an idea with emotion, precomposition with improvisation, discipline with spontaneity.
These artists have an affinity for the controlled yet significant gesture, the performed essence, a result of concentrated internal selection from a vast repertoire of expressive options. This stripped down approach to craft often obscures a wider technical command than is immediately apparent. If you're looking for order, you will find it. But even when these artists systematically subvert themselves for the devious pleasure of it, they still maintain a level of control where they strange can be made familiar - and vice versa. By eschewing displays of obvious virtuosity, the artist gains the advantage of a kind of mystery.
A good jazz improviser can make one note do the job of many. Incomplete utterances can fully communicate an idea. Imply, don't state. Artwork doesn't have a necessary end goal. Ideas, rendered in these artists' distinctive lo-fi argot, feel aired out and simplified without being rendered trivial. A sense of satisfactory unsatisfaction remains. The artwork featured in Your Gold Teeth II is about the opening up of ideas and approaches, not the pin-point sharpening of them. - Todd Levin, June 2009
Marianne Boesky Gallery is located at 509 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues. Our summer hours are Monday to Friday from 10am to 6pm beginning June 23rd. For further information or images, please contact Annie Rana at 212.680.9889 or annie@marianneboeskygallery.com."
Levin, T. "Your Gold Teeth II, curator's statement." posted at Marianne Boesky Gallery website. accessed July 3, 2009. http://www.marianneboeskygallery.com/exhibitions/2009-06-19_your-gold-teeth-ii-curated-by-todd-levin/pressrelease/
2009 Bone's Beat, Village Voice blog:
"
courtesy Marianne Boesky Gallery
The discreet jiggle that comes with the New York art world's switch to summer hours--Monday to Friday instead of Tuesday to Saturday--acts as a blunt industry-wide signal: the people who buy and sell art at a high level have checked out until September. Some are chasing fashionable azure horizons from weekend to weekend, basically moving their operation to where the money's camped for the season, while the rest are wealthy enough to take real vacations. Pressure eases beautifully in the top dogs' absence. Unmonitored, the junior skeleton crews at the galleries unclench themselves, enjoying their jobs and smiling with more than just pursed lips, and the barn-like desolation and exquisitely tuned air conditioning make for a preferable July grime timeout than a bob into your hysterical avenue standby. So adios, Old Navy, it's quirky summer group show time in Chelsea.
Your Gold Teeth II, which just opened at Marianne Boesky, announced itself with a freewheeling and polemical press release that claims, in between bits on Robert Lowell and jazz improvisation, that "the cultural bar has been lowered to the point of absurdity." Curator Todd Levin throws himself behind a chunky thesis that indulges a lot of the man's strongly expressed grievances about "hipness," "facile irony," and "posturing," too many perhaps, but I'll boil it down: Mr. Levin is looking for sincerity and openness on the contemporary scene. I'm not sure that the lyrics to the Steely Dan song of the show's title need have been reprinted in full on the press release's flipside, but this is what summer shows are all about. These seldom-remembered exhibitions clearly mean a great deal to the people who put them together, who know that the chance to volunteer their tastes without a cool, self-preserving hedge does not come around when the fearsomely stoic professional facade of this industry is at full strength.
At the same time, the seams of the business are revealed when the audience is not expected to be looking very hard. Marianne Boesky has dozens of mouths to feed whatever the weather, and Your Gold Teeth II presents bankable opportunities to the dealer, the curator (no stranger to the money game himself as the curator of hedge fund manager Adam Sender's $100-million-plus collection) and, third in line, the loyal clients. A show like this can chase up-to-the-minute trends for quick flips, clean commercially tarnished gems, and dust off retrouve artists in hopes of establishing strong market values. It is a grab bag of techniques to make as much quick money as possible in the off-season.
Ceramics are hot this year, buoyed by certified art world events like Sterling Ruby's home run at Metro Pictures in March and the global ripple from the ICA Philadelphia's ambitious survey Dirt on Delight, so there's a raft of ceramic work in this show that's looking to glom on to the moment as a result. Older artists who've had a bump in visibility through well-received museum retrospectives and magazine cover-stardom have had early works plucked from collector walls and plonked in the show to see what they can do, from Mary Heilmann (New Museum, Artforum, Art in America) to Franz West (LA County Museum, Artforum) and Barkley Hendricks (Studio Museum Harlem, Artforum). Pieces that have been languishing on the secondary market at too high a price--I imagine the very nice Basquiat oilstick piece from '82 has been knocking around for a while--are given a chance to benefit from new context and to shake the psychological dings and scratches that come from being tossed from dealer to fishing dealer.
These business matters are both interesting and obviously distasteful, but there is also a beating heart to this show. Levin's aesthetic favors the handmade and the passed down, the spooky and the meditative, the crafty and the inventive, the unflashily, ineffably authentic. The 73 works on show are affable and all over the place, loose and ready to coalesce, generously, however the viewer sees fit.
Yoko Ono's Painting To Hammer a Nail is a white wooden panel with bashed-in nails over its surface. A light-duty hammer hangs from a chain, and a tin of nails is pegged to the wall below. It wasn't you, and I didn't dare try, but somebody knocked in those nails, and their great pleasure in the act lingers as if it just happened. Fischli & Weiss' 1987 Schublade is a wooden dresser drawer cast in black rubber, an object that hovers between Ikea banality and terrifying fetish. There's an hour-long fixed-angle video from 1999 in which Bruce Nauman methodically digs a deep hole in a patchy desert field, while Rodney Graham's four-minute film--super-8 footage of drifting ducks and wavy blossoms intercut with a Gibson guitar slowly, lovingly buffed with a fluffy white shammy--goes nowhere even more explicitly.
Roe Etheridge presents two photographs, a late afternoon platter of a perfect half-dozen Oysters and Sarah Beth with Pipe, wherein the willowy crumpet in question takes a heroic puff of grass. It seems preposterous that these brazen moments of leisure and simplicity grow to endear instead of offend, but this is the show working as it hopes to. Levin's plea for sincerity takes hold as the gentle collective pulse of this grouping becomes harder to deny and the experience of taking pleasure in art approaches something like second nature. The commercial art world can never really take a holiday from its fundamental baseness and vulgarity. But this is the sort of show that reminds a viewer that art does have the power to trump money, for a few short months anyway."
Bones' Beat: Chelsea Summer Season Begins with Your Gold Teeth II at Marianne Boesky". June 25, 2009. Village Voice website accessed July 3, 2009. http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/archives/2009/06/bones_beat_summ.php
2009 Paula Hayes:
Photo Credit: Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/11/garden/11landscape.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1
2009 Roberta Smith:
"Your Gold Teeth II” is a smart and fantastically inclusive group show organized by the independent curator Todd Levin. It is named for a Steely Dan song, and its opening act, in rock concert terms, is a project show of Paula Hayes’s latest terrariums and plant holders. The resulting double-header might be titled “Living With Nature/Looking at Art.”
Ms. Hayes is a trained sculptor and gardener who has combined both interests in functional art for the last decade. Her latest terrariums are bigger than before and especially satisfying as sculpture. Their clear, thick-walled, hand-blown glass volumes are layered with contrasting striations of pebbles, terra-cotta beads, earth and finally plants; they enhance the wonder of plant life.
Some are small and lie on the floor, like very large bubbles. Others rise vertically to as much as four and a half feet, like smooth, abbreviated cactuses, with the plants nearly at eye level. For those lacking green thumbs, there are also terrariums filled with crystals of different sizes and colors.
On the gallery’s terrace Ms. Hayes has arranged a rather overwrought garden of worthwhile individual delights. There are paving stones made of recycled rubber and a birdbath of clear acrylic that looks like an icicle. Best of all are Ms. Hayes’s planters. Those in soft silicone have a lopsided luminescence; others are made of sheets of thick rubber rendered useful by being either folded or outfitted with a drawstring. Like the glass terrariums these containers seem like life forms themselves.
In the main galleries Mr. Levin has assembled a visual rebus that deliberately ignores those increasingly irrelevant divides between art and craft, old and new, commercial and fine. The works are arranged in unusually tight clusters without labels; formal and visual affinities are established before you quite know what you’re looking at. It’s a great way to erode visual prejudice.
Mr. Levin matches up the browns in Barkley L. Hendricks’s painting of a black woman with an enormous potlike sculpture by Peter Voulkos. He orchestrates a little meditation on spheres, holes and containers with works by Demetrius Oliver, Cady Noland, Roe Ethridge, Bruce Nauman, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Paul Outerbridge and Ed Moulthrop, a master wood turner. Is that a see-through grid by Alan Shields next to the jacquardlike abstraction by Jay Heikes? No, it is by Ed Rossbach, who was a leading figure in fiber art. Elsewhere an unusually abstract drawing by James Castle is effectively paired with a geometric basket by John McQueen.
To a list of fairly usual suspects (Alighiero E. Boetti, Franz West, Sergej Jensen), Mr. Levin has added the pots of George Ohr, the evocative fiber pieces of Françoise Grossen and Diane Itter and the glass works of Marin Lipofsky and Toots Zynsky. He has also come up with marvelous things by David Hammons, Alexandra Bircken, Hannah Greely, Janis Avotins and Joseph Cornell. Again and again this show makes you stop, look close and think.
Nearly every juxtaposition reveals shared concerns and questions needless division. It’s a very big and exciting art world out there, if it would ever get itself together."Hayes, P. "Paula Hayes." NY Times, July 2, 2009. website accessed July 3, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/03/arts/design/03gall.html
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