The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

The Whitney Museum has a hit on its hands: a beautiful show organized by a young curator that makes a cogent case for the work of a young artist. In a season when many New York museums are devoting a lot of energy to the past, the Whitney’s survey of work by Wade Guyton stands out as a cause for optimism. Yes, interesting art is being made here and now. And yes, there are serious ways that museums can present this art that are beyond the scope of even the richest commercial galleries.

Like many artists Mr. Guyton, who is 40, is both a radical and a traditionalist who breaks the mold but pieces it back together in a different configuration. He is best known for austere, glamorous paintings that have about them a quiet poetry even though devised using a computer, scanner and printer. The show is titled “Wade Guyton: OS,” referring to computer operating systems.

Uninterested in drawing by hand, much less in wielding a paintbrush, he describes himself as someone who makes paintings but does not consider himself a painter. His vocabulary of dots, stripes, bands and blocks, as well as much enlarged X’s and U’s and occasional scanned images, combines the abstract motifs of generic Modernism and the recycling strategies of Andy Warhol and Pictures Generation artists like Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine.

One of his principal themes, which he endlessly cites and parodies yet reveres, is Modernism as an epochal style of art, design and architecture that permeates our culture from the artist’s loft to the corporate boardroom. Another is modernity as an inescapable current condition, personified in his case by his adaptation, as just another kind of paintbrush, of the digital technology that pervades our everyday lives.

While clearly not made by hand, his works are noticeably imperfect. The paintings in particular clearly tax the equipment that generates them; they emerge with glitches and irregularities — skids, skips, smears or stutters — that record the process of their own making, stress the almost human fallibility of machines and provide a semblance of pictorial incident and life.

The line between what the artist has chosen and what technology has willed is constantly blurred. For one thing, to achieve paintings of substantial width, Mr. Guyton must fold his canvas and run it through the printer twice; this gives nearly every image halves that are rarely in sync. You will notice this right off the elevator, where the exhibition’s first wall features five paintings of oddly off-register images of flames, each punctuated by large, often fragmented U’s. Even more emphatic discrepancies are apparent in an extended eight-panel work in which thick black horizontal bands alternating with white ones skittishly slant every which way but level; their jangling patterns form a rhythmic, slow-motion Op Art.

The Guyton show has been organized by Scott Rothkopf, a 36-year-old Whitney curator who has also written a convincing if overlong catalog essay illuminating this artist’s development, and he plotted, in collaboration with Mr. Guyton, a brilliant installation. More than 80 works are on view, mostly paintings but also computer drawings and a few sculptures. Dating primarily from the last decade, they are displayed on and among a series of parallel walls, some quite narrow. As you move around, works seem to slide in and out of view, like images in different windows on a computer screen. The changing vistas reveal the artist’s motifs migrating restlessly from one scale or medium to another. The U’s from the fire images are extruded into three dimensions in a group of 17 sculptures of mirrored stainless steel in 10 different sizes. Placed in a tight row they form the show’s one instance of physical perfection and suggest an irregular sculpture by Donald Judd but are in fact individual works, temporarily brought together.

Born in Hammond, Ind., Mr. Guyton absorbed the critical theory of the 1970s and ’80s as an art major at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville before seeing much art. And according to Mr. Rothkopf’s essay Mr. Guyton still enjoys looking at paintings in books as much as at the real thing, intrigued by the ways photographs alter and distort them. He came to New York in 1996 to attend graduate school at Hunter College, and his first exhibited works here were sculptures that evoked an ersatz Modernism, most effectively in pieces casually executed in smoked and mirrored plexiglass.

In 2002 he began appropriating images by a method more direct than his Pictures Generation elders. Instead of rephotographing photographs, he simply tore illustrations from books or auction catalogs and ran them through his printer, superimposing lines, X’s, thick bands or grids on their images. In one drawing here two dark yellow X’s printed on an image of a modern kitchen perfectly match a cabinet, suggesting that color-coordinated abstract art is essential to a stylish home. In another, a series of thick horizontal bars partly obscure an old half-timbered building whose geometric patterns are structurally necessary, not decorative.

By 2004 Mr. Guyton was enlarging these motifs and printing them on canvas, making paintings that are rife with ghosts. His black monochromes evoke Ad Reinhardt and the Black paintings of Frank Stella (especially when the printer goes slightly awry and starts imposing white pinstripes). His more diaphanous gray ones can summon Mark Rothko’s veils of color, while paintings featuring the blunt, fragmented X’s can summon more Stella Minimalist sculpture or eroding corporate logos.

A field of red and green stripes scanned from the end papers of a book conjures the work of Color Field abstractionists like Kenneth Noland and Gene Davis as well as Christmas wrapping paper. They first appear in two vertical paintings exhibited side by side, where they are printed in similar scales but with quite different results in tone and texture. In both paintings two large black dots in the wide white margin above the stripes lend a clownish air.

The same stripes appear again, in something close to their original scale, in several computer drawings that are sandwiched between plexiglass in a big four-square frame that mimics both a window and a canvas stretcher. (They mask images of a Stella aluminum stripe painting and sculptures by Naum Gabo and Anton Pevsner.) And the stripes culminate in one of the show’s grander moments, running horizontally and much enlarged across two immense paintings — one 50 feet long, the other nearly 30 — that cover most of the north wall of the gallery. Here they seem extravagant and bold, yet they also resemble large bolts of fabric, unrolled, with the starts and stops of the printer creating trompe l’oeil folds. Up close you encounter another digital mystery. The extreme magnification creates an illusion of two kinds of textile: the green as a twill pattern, the red as tweed fuzzy with little orange dots.

In what seems to be a typical Guyton touch the big-statement grandeur of these works is played down. They seem to be deliberately crowded by “Drawings for a Large Picture,” which consists of 85 unframed computer drawings displayed in nine vitrines lined with eye-popping blue linoleum. The drawings are casually arranged — laid out in rows, piled in corners — suggesting the constant flux that is the natural condition of images in our time.

-By Roberta Smith

Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times
“The Ego and the Id,” installed at the Doris C. Freedman Plaza in Central Park in 2004.

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: July 26, 2012

Franz West, an influential Austrian sculptor with a penchant for art objects that were willfully unserious, nonideological and accessible and were displayed in Central Park and on the plaza at Lincoln Center, as well as in international exhibitions and blue-chip galleries around the world, died on Wednesday in Vienna. He was 65.His death was announced by the Franz West Foundation. He had been ill for some time.

Mr. West’s work ranged from collages to furniture to large, colorful public sculptures. It consistently embodied a kind of friendly iconoclasm in which form and function were pitted against each other, and the notion of artwork as an autonomous object was frequently undermined. His homely, rough-surfaced materials, like plaster or papier-mâché, sometimes doused with color, challenged accepted taste.

His efforts contributed equally to two of contemporary art’s most persistent trends: the interactive, collaboration-prone art of relational aesthetics and the cobbled-together assemblage-like objects called bricolage. He was also known for large, irreverent sculptures, like those shown in Manhattan in 2004 whose cartoonish, sausagelike shapes and patchwork surfaces, made of lacquered aluminum, parodied the usual decorum of abstract public art.

Mr. West, who represented Austria at the 1990 Venice Biennale, was less a strikingly original artist who changed the course of art than an astute synthesizer and incisive adjuster. He operated on a parallel course to contemporary art, commenting and satirizing, creating a vast multimedia universe that fomented an active mingling of painting, sculpture, collage, furniture and even works (most of which he owned) by the artists he admired.

But his work was also steeped in various figurative and avant-garde traditions of postwar European art. Its DNA included the elongated, encrusted figures of Giacometti, the plaster-coated paintings of Jean Fautrier, the reliclike sculptures of Joseph Beuys, Dieter Roth’s objects made of chocolate and other decaying foodstuffs, and the polymorphous formal wit of the painter Sigmar Polke.

Mr. West was born on Feb. 16, 1947, in Vienna. His father was a coal dealer, his mother a dentist who took her son with her on art-viewing trips to Italy. Mr. West was unclear about his aims in life and sometimes said he started making art “mostly to calm my mother, who was fed up that I did nothing.”

He started making crude drawings around 1970 before moving on to painted collages incorporating magazine images that showed the influence of Pop Art. He was also attracted to newsprint as a material both to paint on and to moisten and form into tentative objects.

By then he was familiar with the work of the Vienna Actionists, whose provocative performances involving masturbation, self-mutilation and dead animals dominated the Viennese art scene of the 1960s. He once said that he had his first taste of the movement when he heard the screams of his mother’s dental patients from her office next door to the family’s apartment.

He deliberately sidestepped Actionism’s physical ordeals and existential intensity. Instead he emphasized a benign, relaxed lightness.

Among his first known efforts were pieces that he called Passtücke, or Adaptives: eccentric white objects formed of plaster or papier-mâché and sometimes rebar that he began making in 1974, three years before he enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where he studied until 1982. There he executed the first of his “wall arrangements,” installations in which he combined his work with that of his fellow students.

The Adaptives, Mr. West’s primary work into the early 1980s, executed a neat, low-key truce between performance and art object. Sometimes incorporating parts of chairs and other found objects, they reflected his early admiration for the all-white paintings and reliefs of Robert Ryman and Piero Manzoni. The difference was that Mr. West’s works were intended to be held, carried or worn by the viewer, and they were often part of larger events.  

Writing about the Adaptives in 1989 in The New York Times on the occasion of Mr. West’s first exhibition in the United States, at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, Michael Brenson noted that they were “meant to be placed over the face, worn around the waist or held in the crook of the neck,” adding that “they leave the wearer looking both protected and trapped.”

Much of Mr. West’s later work developed from ideas implicit in the Adaptives. He sometimes invited other artists to apply paint or collage to their white surfaces. Soon he was adding color himself to pieces that were too large to handle, and which he therefore called “legitimate sculptures.”

These evolved into considerably larger painted papier-mâché and cardboard works whose fragmentary shapes and distressed surfaces had an ancient mien, as if they had survived the vicissitudes of time. They were succeeded by larger, hilariously bulbous, vibrantly colored papier-mâché pieces.

In the early 1980s he started expanding on the possibilities of the found furniture incorporated into some of the Adaptives, making spindly chairs and divans out of rebar that parodied elegant furniture while being quite elegant and surprisingly comfortable themselves. This development led in turn to increasingly ambitious installations that combined furniture, sculpture, paintings and, frequently, works by other artists.

A large presentation consisting of row upon row of divans, covered with Oriental rugs, suggestive of a theater without a stage and titled “Auditorium,” was one of the biggest hits of the 1992 Documenta in Kassel, Germany. A variation called “Test and Rest” was later installed on the roof of the Dia Art Foundation in Chelsea.

In the late 1990s, Mr. West turned to the immense lacquered aluminum pieces, the first (and several after) inspired by the forms of Viennese sausages, as well as the shapes of the Adaptives. With their hot monochrome colors and irregular patchwork surfaces, these works were immensely appealing and also meant for sitting and lying. They both confirmed and belied Mr. West’s contention that “it doesn’t matter what the art looks like but how it’s used.”

Mr. West’s first marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Tamuna Sirbiladze, a painter; their children, Emily Anouk West and Lazaré Otto West; and his sister, Anne Gutjahr.  

Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan A detail from “Catasta” (“Stack”), made out of piled fiber-cement tubes, in the retrospective of Mr. Boetti’s life’s work, opening on Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art. More Photos »

By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: June 28, 2012

The statue is a 1993 self-portrait of the Italian artist Alighiero Boetti, who died a year after it was made and who seems to have lived his life in a kind of fever delirium of ideas, many of which thread through “Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan,” a magical survey of his art. Part of it is on view in the museum’s atrium, with the rest to open on the sixth floor on Sunday.

Boetti was born in 1940 in Turin, the Motor City of Italy and the home of Fiat. He came of age creatively in the 1960s. Influenced by Duchamp, by industrial culture and by a natural attraction to the intricacies of language and arcane systems of logic, he made work that at first was low on formal allure and packed tight with conceptual content.

Certainly the first objects you see on MoMA’s sixth floor are far from prepossessing: sheets of printed graph paper; a ziggurat-shaped column of rolled commercial cardboard; a seemingly half-finished piece of embroidery; a picture postcard of two look-alike men holding hands; a light bulb in a box.

Yet each of these things, or groups of things, is a study in complication, a visual essay on the ambiguities that surround conventional notions of measurement, meaning, value and time. All the printed lines of the graph paper, for example, have, for no given reason, been traced over, freehand, in pencil, firmly here, shakily there, so that a common emblem of geometric exactitude has become personalized, like the lines of an encephalogram.

The ziggurat sculpture is tall, and for that reason monumental, though it’s also a giant toy, produced through a version of a trick that Boetti remembered performing as a child, when he put his finger in the center hole of a rolled tape measure and pulled upward to create a mini-tower.

The embroidery, consisting of three patches of brown wool stitched by Boetti’s first wife and collaborator, Annemarie Sauzeau, on an otherwise empty piece of cloth, looks like a work in progress, though it’s as complete as it needs to be. The shapes of the stitched patches are quite specific: they exactly correspond to maps of Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip printed in an Italian newspaper at the time of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.

The hand-holding twins on the postcard are easily identifiable as a double portrait of Boetti, who would repeatedly over the years present himself as a dual, left-brain-versus-right-brain personality. He trained himself to write and draw ambidextrously and transformed himself from solo artist to artist-team by adding a conjunction to his name: Alighiero Boetti became Alighiero e Boetti: Alighiero AND Boetti.

Finally, there’s the light bulb in the box, a clunky, self-effacing piece that turns out to be the most charismatic object of all. The bulb is programmed to turn on once a year, for a mere 11 seconds, and on a random schedule. Even Boetti couldn’t predict when it might light, though the idea that it will at some point do so creates a tension of expectation. Maybe you’ll be the one looking at it when the magic moment occurs.

In these early concept-intensive works, Boetti laid out the fundamentals of his career. They include an interest in the concept of natural variation built into repetition and accident built into control; a preference for collaboration (including self-collaboration) as working method; a fascination with geography and the larger world beyond art; and a deep sense of investment, philosophical but also emotional, in the workings of time.

In the mid-1960s, certain features of Boetti’s art, notably its use of found and down-market materials, recommended him to a group of Italian experimental artists gathered under the rubric of Arte Povera. Initially, Boetti found their company stimulating and threw himself into collective activities. The MoMA show, organized in collaboration with the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid and the Tate Modern in London, includes a poster he designed in 1967, listing the names of the vanguard “poor art” crew, his own among them.

Within a few years, though, he began to back away, claiming that the Arte Povera work had become materially too showy — “baroque” was his word — and its makers too commercially ambitious. (He tended to affect a contrasting slacker pose, evident in another self-portrait formed from lumps of cement, in which he lies prone on the floor.)

His break with group identity, coupled with his discomfort with the growing violence of Italian politics, propelled Boetti into traveling abroad. Within a relatively short time he visited Africa, South America, the United States and East and Central Asia, becoming a prototype of the artist as global nomad that is now a norm.

The trips took his art in new directions. In the early 1970s he initiated mail-art projects that brought into play language, chance, networking and madly intricate levels of tabulation (keeping track of what mail got sent to whom, when and where, and then what got re-sent, etc.).

His most fruitful trip was to Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1971, the first of many he would make until the Russian invasion of the country in 1979. There most of his abiding concerns — with collaboration, everyday materials, internationalism, the passage of time — were finally united in one grand and continuing plan that centered around his commissioning of embroideries, based on specified designs, by Afghan craftswomen.

As a test run, he ordered two small examples, for which he provided text drawings. One spelled out Dec. 16, 2040, in block letters and numerals, the other July 11, 2023. The first referred to the centenary of his birth; the second, to the day he predicted he would die. The embroiderers sewed the dates precisely onto fabric and surrounded them with floral decorations, an addition Boetti loved precisely because he hadn’t expected it.

Satisfied, he then began to commission the large embroidered images of maps that are now synonymous with his name. The templates for them were standardized, printed world maps used in European classrooms. Boetti had tracings of them made, which he customized by filling in the contours of individual countries with the colors of national flags. He then sent the models off or delivered them in person to Kabul, where he had financed a small hotel.

The first completed map embroidery, dated 1971-72, is in the MoMA show and hung toward the end of the sixth-floor installation. It’s a splendid, regal thing. The national colors are jewel-bright; the oceans sapphire blue, with stitch-work that seems to simulate the texture of moving water. More than a hundred such embroideries were produced over the next two decades and more. And inevitably the main image varied in details from one version to the next.

Sometimes this was Boetti’s doing. Although he claimed little overt interest in politics, he was alert to international news. As nations came and went or shifted affiliation, he updated his map drawings, making radical revisions after the splintering of the Soviet Union. At one point he began to use a new map altogether, one that gave more prominence to the Southern Hemisphere.

The Afghan artisans introduced changes of their own. Personnel changed; levels of skills varied. When embroiderers ran short of a particular color thread and had to substitute another, oceans came out pink, yellow or red instead of blue. Boetti approved of, even treasured, any and all such differences and from the start established the framing borders of the textiles as a free zone, open to all, for religious texts, political commentary and poetry in Italian, English and Farsi.

In 1980, with the Soviet occupiers entrenched and Afghanistan’s borders closed, production came to a forced halt. For the next few years, Boetti went through his own crisis of creativity before reconnecting with Afghan artisans in exile in Pakistan. At this point he shifted gears somewhat by ordering, in addition to the maps, a set of 50 kilim carpets, woven by men, with abstract, pixelated geometric designs determined by a complex system of mathematical variables.

The MoMA show’s organizer, Christian Rattemeyer, the museum’s associate curator of drawings, has placed nine of the kilims on the floor of the atrium, each under a bare light bulb, as if to accommodate a congregation of abstract thinkers, some of them Sufi perhaps — Boetti was very interested in Sufism — for discussion and contemplation.

The walls surrounding the rugs are hung with map embroideries, but also with less familiar textiles, including one from a 1994 series called “Tutto.” “Tutto” means “all,” “everything,” and that’s what this embroidery seems to hold. It’s crammed, jigsaw-style, crazy quilt-style, with themes and images that weave through Boetti’s career: twins, hardware, lamps, letters, towers, continents, abstractions.

Given that it was created the year the artist died of cancer, it could be read as a kind of deathbed vision of past life passing in a chaotic stream before his eyes, though it’s just as likely he had another image in mind, that of a great steaming stew of life on the boil, rich with piquant memories and fresh ideas.

“Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan” continues through Oct. 1 at the Museum of Modern Art; (212) 708-9400, moma.org.

 

There’s a bittersweet addition to the Museum of Modern Art’s sculpture garden this summer. Half hidden in the shade of a tree, it’s a life-size bronze statue of a gaunt-looking guy holding a fountainlike hose in one hand. When water spraying from it hits his head, steam rises, as if his brain were sizzling.