Miles Coolidge

Miles Coolidge

Acme Gallery

Through February 9, 2008

Miles Coolidge currently has a show this month at both Casey Kaplan in New York and Acme in Los Angeles. Originally from Canada, Coolidge studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the famous Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, the school of the likes of Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Thomas Struth, and many more of the strongest photographers working today. Like the Bechers and many of their famous students, Coolidge is drawn to the overlooked or the abandoned, uses types or themes in his work, and is dedicated to a precise rendering of objects to give his subjects a carved, crisp feel. Coolidge, who now works in Los Angeles, has grown into his new environment especially in terms of content -- suburban garages, bridges, and strip malls. Now, he has turned his attention to abandoned furniture, and his new work at Acme is understated but very impressive.

The photographs initially remind one of the Bechers with their strong center images and the crisp detail of the furniture surfaces, but it is perhaps more interesting to regard their relationship to the history of perception and to the wonderful still lives of Jeff Wall. To many, Wall’s most highly regarded photographs are his still life series from the early nineties, especially Diagonal Composition, 1993 and Some Beans, 1990. These photographs were considered brilliant reprisals and critiques of modernist composition, specifically Constructivism. At the same time, Wall’s photographs complicate perception and make the simplest scenes and scenarios seem alien and full of disjuncture. The clean lines and shapes that one would expect from constructivism become the dirty lines of a sink and the old legs of a table.

Coolidge’s series Street Furniture does a similar thing, and in my opinion they might even be more effective. While Wall reinvents Constructivism through carefully framed images of rough, workshop moments, Coolidge arranges found furniture in such a way that the couches and chairs define a certain discourse on perception. The photos establish themselves through a straightforward figure (the furniture presents itself to the viewer as it would in life) but then the ground of the picture shifts in innovative ways. The result is a disorientation that compels one to examine how one sees, namely that the habits of looking that determine the experiential ground by which you see. The viewers’ sense of left, right, down up, does not match the world presented in the photo. This disjoint is interesting.

Most of the time when one thinks of experiential art, one thinks of installations or sculptors as in the shifting planes of weight and steel constructed by Richard Serra, the soft walls of Robert Irwin, or the perhaps the demented Broadway of Mike Kelley. One does not typically go to a photograph. Even though Coolidge’s art is not in the round, it still creates a physical experience -- one could say anti-phenomenological experience where we are forced out of our normal, embodied way of going through life.

Photos courtesy of Acme Gallery

Quick Picks on ArtSlant

If you are in Los Angeles, you might check out Tony Delap, Neil Farber, and the many projects James Turrell has going on at the moment. Here is my brief write-up on these three artists and their current shows on ArtSlant.

Barack Obama on the Arts

Although, I cannot yet say I fully support Barack Obama, I am interested in any message linking candidates to their views on the arts. This was forwarded to me. I cannot say for certain whether or not it came directly from the Obama campaign, but that is story I was told, and that is what I am going on. Enjoy.

"Thank you for contacting us in support of the arts. Senator Obama is a champion for arts and culture. He knows that our nation's creativity has filled the world's libraries, museums, recital halls, movie houses, and marketplaces with works of genius. The arts embody the American spirit of self-definition. As the author of two best-selling books - Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama uniquely appreciates the role and value of creative expression.

That's why he will reinvest in Arts Education. To remain competitive in the global economy, America needs to reinvigorate the kind of creativity and innovation that has made this country great. To do so, we must nourish our children's creative skills. In addition to giving our children the science and math skills they need to compete in the new global context, we should also encourage the ability to think creatively that comes from a meaningful arts education. Unfortunately, many school districts are cutting instructional time for art and music education.

Barack believes that the arts should be a central part of effective teaching and learning. The Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts recently said, "The purpose of arts education is not to produce more artists, though that is a byproduct. The real purpose of arts education is to create complete human beings capable of leading successful and productive lives in a free society." To support greater arts
education, Obama will:

- Expand Public/Private Partnerships Between Schools and Arts Organizations: Barack Obama will increase resources for the U.S. Department of Education's Arts Education Model Development and Dissemination Grants, which develop public/private partnerships between schools and arts organizations. Obama will also engage the foundation and corporate community to increase support for public/private partnerships.

- Create an Artist Corps: Barack Obama supports the creation of an "Artists Corps" of young artiststrained to work in low-income schools and their communities. Studies in Chicago have demonstrated that test scores improved faster for students enrolled in low-income schools that link arts across the curriculum than scores for students in schools lacking such programs.

- Publicly Champion the Importance of Arts Education: As president, Barack Obama will use the bully pulpit and the example he will set in the White House to promote the importance of arts and arts education in America . Not only is arts education dispensable for success in a rapidly changing, high skill, information economy, but studies show that arts education raises test scores in other subject areas as well.

- Support Increased Funding for the NEA: Over the last 15 years, government funding for the National Endowment for the Arts has been slashed from $175 million annually in 1992 to $125 million today. Barack Obama supports increased funding for the NEA, the support of which enriches schools and neighborhoods allacross the nation and helps to promote the economic development of countless communities.

- Promote Cultural Diplomacy: American artists, performers and thinkers representing our values and ideals can inspire people both at home and all over the world. Through efforts like that of the United States Information Agency , America 's cultural leaders were deployed around the world during the Cold War as artistic ambassadors and helped win the war of ideas by demonstrating to the world the promise of America . Artistscan be utilized again to help us win the war of ideas against Islamic extremism. Unfortunately, our resources for cultural diplomacy are at their lowest level in a decade. Barack Obama will work to reverse this trend and improve and expand public-private partnerships to expand cultural and arts exchanges throughout the world.Attract Foreign Talent: The flipside to promoting American arts and culture abroad is welcoming members of the foreign arts community to America . Opening America 's doors to students and professional artists provides the kind of two-way cultural understanding that can break down the barriers that feed hatred and fear. AsAmerica tightened visa restrictions after 9/11, the world's most talented students and artists, who used to come here, went elsewhere. Barack Obama will streamline the visa process to return America to its rightful place as the world's top destination for artists and art students.

- Provide Health Care to Artists: Finding affordable health coverage has often been one of the most vexing obstacles for artists and those in the creative community. Since many artists work independently or have nontraditionalemployment relationships, employer-based coverage is unavailable and individual policies are financially out of reach. Barack Obama's plan will provide all Americans with quality, affordable health care.His plan includes the creation of a new public program that will allow individuals and small businesses to buy affordable health care similar to that available to federal employees. His plan also creates a National Health Insurance Exchange to reform the private insurance market and allow Americans to enroll in participatingprivate plans, which would have to provide comprehensive benefits, issue every applicant a policy, and charge fair and stable premiums. For those who still cannot afford coverage, the government will provide a subsidy.His health plan will lower costs for the typical American family by up to $2,500 per year.

- Ensure Tax Fairness for Artists: Barack Obama supports the Artist-Museum Partnership Act, introduced by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT). The Act amends the Internal Revenue Code to allow artists to deduct the fairmarket value of their work, rather than just the costs of the materials, when they make charitable contributions."

Robert Irwin: Primaries and Secondaries

Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Downtown
OCTOBER 21, 2007 through February 23, 2008 (Jacobs Building) and through April 13, 2008 (1001 Kettner)

We heard from Robert Irwin quite a bit this year. Last Spring, he sat down with Michael Govan at LACMA to talk about his plans for the Palm Garden that you can see slowly being prepared for the opening of The Broad Contemporary Art Museum in February. Also at LACMA, Irwin’s work features prominently at LACMA’s So Cal show, tracing the path of Los Angeles art from the early 1960s into the late 1970s. Last year, Irwin’s show at PaceWildenstein in New York was well received, and now the large work from that show, Whose Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue, is on view and retooled along with a look at both the past and future of Irwin at the downtown branch of Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.

The place of art history becomes a central point of the show. Irwin’s early work seemed indebted to Abstract Expressionism, aligned with it in way that it feels second generation and muddy. Irwin really came into his own when he started leaving those ideas and began reducing his paintings to pale scrims of colors with lines hovering like multiple horizon lines across the sky. At this time, Irwin’s thinking was moving far a field from the art world proper as many were doing at that time. Artists were leaving the gallery and traditional materials behind – they moved to desert, to remote mountain tops, out of cities entirely. As for Irwin, he admitted in his discussion with Govan that in the 60s, he was moving into areas with his work better suited to philosophy and science, and felt more comfortable conferring with people like Richard Feynman and philosophers than visual artists. Irwin even worked with NASA briefly.

However, Irwin’s line and dot pieces from the 60s do not feel mathematical or precise in the way that say Donald Judds wall works stack and configure according to a schema or maybe Mel Bochner’s use of mathematical sequences. Irwin’s work feels intuitive, and quite unattached to rulers and measures. In this respect, you could think of Barnett Newman or Mark Rothko, Irwin indulging color and divisions of light and space according to, in Rothko’s case, mood, or in Newman’s case, a quest for a sublime landscape. Maybe both mood and the sublime might be pushing the language too far into melodrama for Irwin’s purposes and spirit. We might instead say he was playing off the phenomenology that Merleau-Ponty described, or that he was manipulating and studying human experience.

Irwin’s earlier work is well documented and discussed, but I was fascinated by the new work especially Whose Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue and the large new work Light and Space. Both of the works are objects, granted objects writ large in language of installation, and, more interesting to me, both seem to be rooted in recent Art History, drawing on direct references and precedents.

The reference to Newman in Whose Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue is present in the title (referring to Newman’s many paintings of the same title). The direct reference is the large Newman work from 1969/70, the one that was famously vandalized in 1982 in Berlin. Newman’s arrangement of color from left to right in his paintings did not match the flow of Red, Yellow, and Blue in his title. He switched the colors around, not retaining that sequence. That was typical of Newman – it wasn’t about rigor, it was about perception and the sublime permeability of one’s sense of self in regards to landscape.

Irwin, however, uses the schema of the title in his work, letting those colors exists in order in the gallery, Red, Yellow, then Blue in a group of three large panels above and matching below on the floor. Irwin’s work seems mindful, however, of human involvement in an architectural space, fully opening up inquiry of perception in a full 3D and lived in realm. You might say his homage to Newman comes post Richard Serra. I could not help but think of the works other direct precedent Serra’s Delineator 1974/75, a work which induces a dizzying effect of weight and mass on the gallery goer.

Of course, Irwin did not need Serra to come to any conclusion about perception. He was doing exquisitely on his own out west. Unlike Serra, Irwin’s work does not focus on weight and mass, it is instead a play of soft hues in gentle transition, a sensitive attunement to how perception works. Ultimately, Irwin’s work is less austere than Newman or Serra, more comfortable, more about color and subtle gradations and mixing of light across the gallery. As Holland Cotter said, the installation feels “like a country teahouse, companionable, dimly lighted, very quiet even when busy, offering spirit-soothing visual fare in an overstimulated world.”

Where in Whose Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue, you felt Serra and Newman, you feel Dan Flavin and perhaps less obviously Jasper Johns in Light and Space, 2007. The Flavin reference is obvious, neon lights make an optical wonderland across an entire wall. But how to account for Irwin’s arrangement of those lights, not at all ordered or arranged into an architecture like Flavin but more open to improvisation?

I thought of Johns' cross-hatch paintings from the 1970s, including his famous Corpse and Mirror which hangs in The Art Institute of Chicago. The formalist grid of painting, that high minded center of modern art, is deconstructed, taken apart, and manipulated in a way that tempts order without ever finding it. Irwin’s line and dot paintings accomplished this feat in the 1960s, and this new work, in my mind, does a similar thing. The piece exists simply as Irwin’s negotiation of light for our benefit, his ability to create an experience that surprises you and does not allow your experiential expectations. Johns’ painting does a similar thing – the things you think you know are not as clear cut as you thought. However, Johns’ work never bursts into soft light. We go to Irwin for that.

Images courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego

Top Image: Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow & Blue³ (installation view), 2006–07
polyurethane paint over lacquer on aircraft honeycomb aluminum24 panels: 132 1/2 x 96 1/2 inches (3.4 x 2.4 m) each; 12 panels: 132 1/2 x 48 1/4 inches (3.4 x 1.2 m) each; overall installation dimensions variable
Photography by Philipp Scholz Ritterman

Bottom Image: Light and Space (installation view), 2007
115 fluorescent lightsone wall: overall dimensions 271 1/4 x 620 inches (6.9 x 15.7 m)
Photography by Philipp Scholz Rittermann

Thoughts on a Year of Art

This was my first full gallery year in Los Angeles. Here are the ones that struck me:

1. Charles Ray, Regen Projects: The best sculpture I’ve seen in years, and I stand by my claim absolutely that Ray is the best pure sculptor in the city. Ten years to complete, his Hinoki tree, made from Japanese Cypress, took over Regen II with its chalky orange bark, twisting broken branches, and light, buoyant existence. You get close and pour over the carving, its thousands of hatch marks pervading the surface. Ultimately, the work is an exercise in the slowing of time, and I will follow the aging of the wood over the course of my lifetime.

2. Medieval Treasures from the Cleveland Art Museum, the Getty: Simply put, a wonderful journey through time. Like the Sinai show of 2006, the Getty presented objects that needed little introduction but vast amounts of time to savor and enjoy.

3. Vincent Johnson, LAXART: Johnson basically took an old Los Angeles air raid siren from the cold war, restored it, and set it right in the middle of a gallery. Gleaming red and confrontational, this found object was endlessly interesting in its own right. Johnson told me that many such colossal engines of noise sat atop tall poles all around the city, sentinels of a troubled age. Johnson left the key in the ignition, a foreboding gesture for contemporary times.

4. Becca Mann, Roberts and Tilton: I was surprised no one really reviewed or discussed this show. Perhaps it was because Mann’s paintings have an overly recognizable pale, washy pallet so pervasive in contemporary painting or maybe we are just not used to seeing a specifically American view of the 19th century, imagery out of civil war history, mining camps, and westward expansion. This was an incredibly sad, creepy show, full of lost relatives and haunting evocation straight out of Poe. In the art world, we usually get our Poe through Baudelaire, our romanticism through silly skulls and lace, and our history from revisionists and polemicists. Mann finds and presents all of these things but in a thoroughly original, beautiful way.

5. Slater Bradley, Blum and Poe: Slater Bradley has not convinced me in the past, but his awakening of lost 19th and early 20th century histories through his use of his doppelganger finally got me. He somehow linked scrimshaw carving, Thomas Edison, Mental Illness, and Singing in the Rain to list just a few of this influences. Bradley seems quite the hipster darling, but don't hold that against him.

6. Vija Celmins, Hammer Museum: Celmins is interested in the humanity and engagement of drawing, especially as a counterpoint to mass reproduction. Taking old photographs, images of sky, sea, and dirt, Celmins’ unbelievable, superrealistic talent is astonishing. I honestly thought the Hammer show would get repetitive and have a sort of “You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all” feel, but it never did. The show just grabs you, and you are happy to stay around a while.

7. Jeni Spota, Sister Gallery: Perhaps the most charming show of the year, Spota’s tiny paintings inspired by Pierre Paolo Pasolini’s religious visions emerged from their canvases as if Spota plucked the images from a soup of unmixed oils. Her effort somehow sustained the metaphor of order from chaos without being heavy-handed, somehow managed to address religion without being offensive or juvenile. Admittedly, the use of Pasolini is far from daring, but it was a nice show nonetheless.

8. Video Art from China, Morona Kiang: I did not see all of this show, and to see all of it would have been a daunting, ten hour task. However, the works I saw, especially Ai Weiwei’s Chang’an Boulevard, 2004 and Chin Chuih-Jen’s The Factory, 2003, convinced me of the possible depth of Chinese video art. This is was a show that asked you to study, to explore, and find art you’ve never seen before.

9. Scott McFarland, Regen Projects: Most critics remain underwhelmed with McFarland’s photography. Afterall, there is a long, perhaps now tired lineage of manipulated photography, especially during a year of Gursky and Wall retrospectives. However, I was taken with this show and McFarland’s altering of natural surroundings, ruins, urban parks and gardens was subtle enough to be very interesting to the eye, calling you to carefully search each photo for the changes.

10. Kim Dingle, Kim Light Gallery: This has to be my guilty pleasure show of the year. I did not want to like the paintings, all of young girls running amok with large birthday cakes. However, I like that Dingle noticed that so many painters use paint as simply icing these days. I like her ability to just acknowledge that trend and have fun with it. This show was silly, but in a good way. The little girls misbehave in a wanton, joyful way, all future princesses and Sex in the City terrors but currently just cute and childish in a way that matches their age. I don’t want to fail to mention that Dingle is very proficient with paint and these were professional, highly finished works.

Ten Favorites: Fernand Khnopff, Portrait of Jeanne Kéfer, 1885

Sometimes I don’t know if I go to the Getty so much because of its gardens and evening views of L.A. or to visit my beloved Fernand Khnopff painting, Portrait of Jeanne Kéfer, 1885. Khnopff was Belgian involved closely with symbolist currents of the late 19th century flowering all over Europe, especially in Victorian England with Rossetti and Holman Hunt, France with the Nabi Fellowship, Gauguin, Redon, and Moreau, Vienna with Klimt, Germany with Klinger, and we shouldn’t forget the Dutchman Johan Thorn Prikker (who happens to have the most hilarious name ever). The roster of great painters is long and deep.

Jeanne Kéfer was the daughter of a friend of Khnopff, and this work is one of the most restrained and haunting portraits around. Small Jeanne is caught in a trap of space, both receding into the door (her dress slightly wooden) and falling forward on a severely sloping floor (her dress serves a double ambivalent duty, it extends forward and down as if against the will of Jeanne). She is obviously unsettled, not offering a smile but expressing further her distrust of the viewer by inserting her hand into the front of her coat. Khnopff placed her slightly off center and the entire scene tilts to the right, and then, in a truly enigmatic gesture, Khnopff get brushy with his blues and black in the door’s window, contrasting the bleached hues of the rest of the painting.

The drama of many of Khnopff’s works occur behind closed doors, where dreams overtake reality and fantasy lives out its locked up melancholy. Knowing Khnopff and not quite sure why Jeanne seems so afraid, I must conclude that the painter makes these gestures on the window to add another troubled edge, the possibility of something horrible in the background, the type of thing that maybe children pickup on and adults fail to notice. If that is true, then the viewer is strangely implicated. Are we the horrific stranger or are we suppose to help this little girl? It is difficult to know. This painting just goes on and on for me. I will visit it for a long time to come. It helps that it is just a few rooms away from James Ensor’s Christ in Brussels, 1888.

Ten Favorites: Robert Rauschenberg, Asheville Citizen, 1952

This transitory experiment in MoMA’s collection by Robert Rauschenberg simply sends my mind reeling. In a way, my citing of the Picasso collage, the De Kooning, and The Burri as my favorites make way for this Rauschenberg, a painting that (in the spirit of his working method) he probably made in a day. However, the work is right on the historical button.

Let’s think about what is going on here. We basically have a dense black field of oil paint on two panels with a copy of North Carolina’s Asheville Citizen newspaper pasted on top, the text rotated ninety degrees. In Asheville in late 1951, Rauschenberg was back at Black Mountain College from New York, making work and getting to know John Cage, the photos of Aaron Siskind, and Joseph Albers, whose rigor would guide his ethic but not his aesthetic. Earlier that summer, Rauschenberg had just presented his White Paintings at Betty Parson’s gallery, which Cage would call “landing strips” for shadows and dust. “Today is their creator,” Rauschenberg told Parsons and their white surfaces were known as surfaces ready to receive, process, and complicate visual information.

In Asheville Citizen, you can feel Rothko and those moody Ab Exers milling around New York, finally receiving the attention they felt they deserved, but you can also feel why Rauschenberg is fundamentally a different sort of artist. Sure, you can sense the presence of Betty Parson’s Barnett Newman’s show that Rauschenberg must have seen in 1950, but in the density of Asheville Citizen’s black field, you can see perhaps why Rauschenberg would have sought out Burri a few months later on a trip to Italy, an artist known for himself bringing the world literally onto the canvas. Rauschenberg’s use of an entire newspaper, uncropped and uncut in contrast to Dada or Picasso’s collages, is something new, a deapan presentation of the news as object and image, an item to be shifted into an awkward position which forces you to look at an ordinary thing in new way. This is different sort of thing than both Ab Ex painters and Picasso alike. Rauschenberg is neither representing nor expressing anything, but instead using the stuff of the world to lead your eye not to high concepts but to street material.

This work seems to be the crux of Rauschenberg – instead of expressing (which he does in his work but not on purpose), he wants to move your eye around, to make you look at everything like a traveler does in a foreign country. The newspaper of Asheville Citizen would soon give birth to the multimedia of the Combines. Rauschenberg, John Cage, and poet Frank O’Hara were all kindred spirits attempting the same thing in different arts – letting the ordinary dazzle instead of ornately embellishing it through aesthetics.

Ten Favorites: Pablo Picasso, Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and Newspaper, 1913

In the Tate Collection, Picasso’s small collage from 1913 is one of the most historically and visually dense works around. In the spirit of Dada and pastiche, Picasso arranges a still life of a bottle, a guitar, and newspaper with a variety of sundry materials, and in a few simple gestures invites a world of shifting symbols and doors. Notice how the patterned wall paper can be seen as the back wall of the room, an open window or the as part of the table. The right-hand void of black does a similar, even more ambiguous twisting of meaning, almost representing something at times while tempting meaninglessness. The bottle could be itself or a gun, although I don’t buy into the reading that these collages are subtly political. And then there is the newspaper, both real and a representation at the same time -- a truly revolutionary moment that continues to feed our vision today.

In this work, we get the full brash genius of Picasso. There are elements of both analytic and synthetic cubism present. Picasso both builds from arbitrary shapes as well as shifts the perspective of known forms. At the time, Picasso was pushing cubism to its decadent breaking point. In works completed at the same time, we see the pliability of Picasso's approach to art. He was an artist who could use the pointalism of Seurat as wallpaper while using the day's paper to create a classical still life.

Ten Favorities: Puvis De Chavannes. The Poor Fisherman, 1881

Contrary to most romantic notions of artists as outsiders, Puvis de Chavannes was a celebrity – a successful painter that found a place at the Paris Salon who had no problem with pitching the same classical allegories over and over. He was a familiar face in Paris – not locked in his attic like Redon, isolated like Cezanne, or full of wanderlust like Gauguin. Puvis’ allegories are soft, wispy, and elusive. They suggest stories that we’ve heard many times but they are slightly unrecognizable, a bit out of context.

My favorite is Poor Fisherman from 1881, a painting that would intrigue and heavily influence a young Picasso. The work is a dreamy take on poverty and family, carefully stretching its central composition to show the heavy pull of the fisherman’s responsibilities. The man and the boat lean with the same physiognomy, and the claw of the net underwater is a haunting premonition of the fisherman’s inevitable failings -- we don’t see the net only its empty structure. The woman picks flowers and the baby lies naked and separate from both parents, and if you think about it, the line and weight created by the woman’s downturned face and the baby’s left arm exert a visual pull on the man’s dejected head.

It is impossible for me to look at Picasso magnificent achievements in the Blue and Rose Periods without thinking of this simple work by Puvis. I thought about putting Picasso's The Old Guitarist here as my favorite instead, but I realized that the source of understanding is sometimes more important. I wouldn’t get the old man without The Poor Fisherman.

Thoughts on a Year of Books

2007 Books

The best book I read this year was Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald, a work that set the tone for my life this year as well as my literary wanderings. When engaging Sebald’s work, it is impossible to tell what is fabricated and what is not. Actually, Sebald’s main character Austerlitz seems more real to me than any of the non-fictional characters I read this year, his melancholy is real and significant, his memories more intense and present than my own. Sebald, the narrator, introduces us to Austerlitz, an historian of architecture who was displaced by World War II, and we follow his story as the narrator discovers it, all the while being presented with beautiful, enigmatic uncaptioned photographs in the text. We find a torn, devastated Europe still capable of bringing forth moments of sublime transcendence.

From Austerlitz, I went on to read three more magnificent books by Sebald, The Emigrants (which was so highly praised by Susan Sontag), The Rings of Saturn, and After Nature, a book of long poems. I wanted to explore more post-war German literature after these works and I moved onto A Sorrow Beyond Dreams by Peter Handke and Thomas Bernard’s book of ultra-short stories, The Voice Imitator. I don’t know whether the beauty of Sebald’s books held me away from the brutal, sparseness of Handke and Bernard, but both books left me cold and hopeless. Handke’s world is without tenderness, heroes or redemption, and no one could escape the unrelenting knife of irony and dark comedy in Bernard. I will continue with Bernard, perhaps moving onto his book Loser. I think I’m finished with Handke.

In terms of short stories, this year has been rich with new literary finds for me as well as with new books from some old favorites. My dear Alice Monro’s book The View From Castle Rock compelled me to seek more information about my history and family, and re-reading stories like The Huntsman and Oysters by Chekhov were welcome studies in how to write simple stories about simple lives with depth and impact. I admit that on my first reading, I could not find much in the stories of Amy Hempel and Richard Ford. Hempel is probably out of my league, and Ford’s characters are so selfish that I couldn’t hang on. On the other hand, I finally got around to Borges’ Labyrinths and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. I am sure I will read them over and over. Borges’ Garden of Forking Paths was the first story I have ever read three times before moving on to the next story. The only other work of art that has compelled that from me was Citizen Kane. Herman Melville’s Bartelby the Scrivener was a great study in soul sucking corporate culture written all the way back in the mid 19th century. I also really enjoyed Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Celestial Railroad – with its description of the City of Vanity Fair as a place that is easy to stop and stay without ever making it beyond, a place “at the height of prosperity, and exhibits the epitome of what’s brilliant, gay and fascinating, beneath the sun.” I can see why so many love the parrot and lovely Félicité in Flaubert’s A Simple Heart. In closing in terms of short fictions, I was happy to find William Trevor. I will be dipping into his collected stories for a long time to come, including his new book Cheating at Canasta.

Poetry is always on my mind, and I am always glad to find new work that has never crossed my path. I found many great poets this year including Bob Hicok, Joshua Clover, Tony Hoagland, C.K. Williams, and my favorite find of the year W.S. Merwin (though admittedly, I was tardy – Merwin is hardly a secret!!). Admittedly, Clover’s poetry is good only in spurts, and usually you have to go back to your French continental thought and re-read Apollonaire to make much sense of it. Hicok gives a great shattering reading in person, but Insomnia Diary is his only written text that held my attention as opposed to Plus Shipping or his new collection This Clumsy Living. Hoagland’s poetry is great, full of raw passages that are “mean,” to use his word, phrases like “Until we say the truth, there can be no tenderness /As long as there is desire, we will not be safe.” I also enjoyed his book on craft, Real Sofistikashun. I am still going to find and read his recommendations on poets and am using his advice in my own work. New Yorker poet C.K. Williams was great to read on the beach in the morning with all of the California lives running by on the sand -- his use of a long, classical line spun with the conventional sonnet works more often than it fails, and he can often paint an entire person with just a few strokes. However, Merwin was the poet that overthrew me this year with his mediations on forgotten languages, the illusions of the everyday, and his earth shattering piece on September 11th, simply addressing the words themselves and showing his true subject only by the date the poem was completed, September 12, 2001.

For novels, I loved Orhan Pamuk’s Snow at the beginning, but ultimately it proved the hardest book for me to complete this year. Its wonderful magical realism was broken by a main character full of melodrama and narcissistic yearning for happiness. I had similar troubles with Jonathon Saffron Foer’s Everything is Illuminated, a clever, heart felt search for family that becomes a little tedious with its overblown textual trickery. After the Foer, I finally, after years, made it to George Eliot’s Silas Marner, a beautiful enough story to queue up Middlemarch as something to read in the future. Admittedly, it reads as a bit quaint in contemporary times. I struggled and eventually gave up on Phillip Roth’s Great American Novel, though I loved Goodbye Columbus years ago and have The Plot Against America on my list for 2008.

All told, I did not read many novels this year besides Sebald and the Germans, only 4. I filled in the gap with non-fiction and plays. I went through a long a prosperous Euripides stage inspired by Mike Kelley’s artwork. I read Medea, Hecuba, The Suppliants, and The Bacchae. Martin McDonough’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane, A Skull in Connemara, The Pillowman, and The Lonesome West were delightfully wicked. Missing the Steppenwolf theater company’s production of The Pillowman last year truly is one of my more ignominious failings. I read Stoppard’s Artist Descending A Staircase again, and again, found a much to take from it to my study of visual art. I discovered Ionesco at last with Rhinoceros, The Bald Soprano, and The Lesson. It is amazing how long it takes me to get around to things.

After hearing Bob Woodward speak, I read his war trilogy -- Bush at War, Plan of Attack, and State of Denial. You only really have to read State of Denial to know how it all played out, but the other two books fill in all of the White House and Defense Department memos that Woodward somehow finds a way to sift through and present journalistically. I will probably move back in time in a study of the presidents. I followed up the war trilogy with The Agenda detailing Clinton’s Economic Policy and its troubles making its way through congress. The best non-fiction work I read this year was The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin, a fascinating study of the personalities on the Supreme Court including Scalia and Ginsberg’s shared affection for holiday parties and opera, Thomas’ zeal for Nascar and RVs, Breyer’s chatty debates, and Kennedy’s forays into international law. Toobin’s hero, however, is O’Conner. I followed The Nine up with Antonin Scalia’s A Matter of Interpretation and Stephen Breyer’s Active Liberty. I am still meditating on them both. At the beginning of last year, Joan Didion’s The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem were great introductions to my new city of Los Angeles.

In terms of literary essays and philosophy, I recommend both The Ethics of Authenticity by Charles Taylor and The Struggle Against Inauthenticity by Geoffrey Hartman. Taylor presents the important and compelling thesis that the “Culture of Authenticity,” namely the social engine that aims for individual self-fulfillment driven by a relativistic spirit of individual morality and tolerance, still presents an ethic and a moral system that is open to social tests and liable to the results it produces. Hartman’s idea in The Struggle Against Inauthenticity, in a way, aims at critiquing the same, listless culture, but in Hartman’s view, a culture unable to cope with the Holocaust and the type of authenticity and spirit that the Holocaust asked of its victims in their effort to not be dehumanized. From the ruins of the war, Hartman makes an argument for the essential validity of art and culture to heal social wounds. For literary essays, I probably lean towards Inner Workings by J.M Coetzee rather than The Curtain by Milan Kundera. At times, Coetzee just dazzles with his clarity and his close readings of authors like Naipaul, Marquez, Gordimer, Faulkner, and Celan, and this book contains an essay on Walter Benjamin that was important for me to see. In the world of the visual arts, Benjamin opened up a world of Marxist approaches to art and its history that continue to be overused and over-quoted. It was great to see someone from another field being intelligent and critical in regards to Benjamin, not so much bringing him down but definitely exposing his troubles. The Curtain is worth the read if not for any other reason than for Kundera’s alternate history of the novel, which demands a new reading schedule that includes authors such as Musil, Kis, Bloch, and Gombrowicz. I hope to get around to all of them this year.

Ten Favorites: Alberto Burri, Mold (Muffa), 1951

I grew up twelve miles from a ruined 59,000 acre World War II camp called Camp Howze. Located outside of Gainesville, Texas, Camp Howze is now little more than a few old water towers and hundreds of cinder block nubs which mark where old barracks and buildings stood. There were many such camps all over the United States, and a large one was in Herford, Texas. In Herford, many Italian prisoners of war were kept, and several of the Italian prisoners of war, artists back in Italy, were taken out of the camp to mural local churches in Herford. One of those prisoners was Alberto Burri, a vanguard Italian painter who was often featured in the New York's famous Stable gallery in the 1950s, who Robert Rauschenberg sought out on his trip to Italy in the early 50s, and whose works, though never advertised, are some of the strongest ever made.

I knew about Herford both before and after I discovered Alberto Burri, but what I didn’t know was Herford’s impact on Burri. Apparently it was Burri’s experience as medic in the war as well as his time in the prison camp inspired his life of painting, a career that was open to impressive, deft experimentation using many unconventional materials like acetylene torches, plastic, burlap, wire, dirt, and acrylic caulk. Often paintings by Burri feature elegant divisions of space in black, brown, cream, and gold, but the paintings that really jolt, the paintings that in my opinion really matter are his gnarled, chewed works in red and black, melted plastic drippings, splattered swatches of burlap, and bursts of dirt and pumice. The work in the Art Institute of Chicago is still my favorite, a shock of grisle and splat once owned by the Chicago story teller Studs Terkle.

Only 28 by 31 inches, it makes sense that this work would have appealed to Studs, with his interest in human emotions, tall tales, and the tough challenges that people face. Burri’s work is as far from sugary as one can get, not functioning according to any recognizable program of painting yet exuding a visceral impact. This is remarkably not a Dubuffet, this is not a romanticizing of the primitive or attempt to get to raw experience. This is a legitimately troubled work, a cannon shot of sludge and mud, a puddle with drops of blood.

Ten Favorites: De Kooning, Excavation, 1950

As Tyler Green is currently doing on Modern Art Notes, I think it is a great idea to name one’s ten favorite paintings if not for any other reason than to force oneself to write and post. Naming ten favorites is no easy task. In fact, the task cuts to quick about your history viewing art, who you are and what you value, why certain things affect you more than others, how art comes into even the most unlikely of lives and finds a place there. To name your ten favorite paintings is to tell stories, rhapsodise a little, shoot off the cuff, get a bit unruly, take sides, and most of all to love past cynicism, past doubt, even past belief. To name your ten is a shifting practice and rightly so, the numbers change, some paintings get bumped out, some get bumped in. The changing self, some things fixed, some things evolving. Here I go. They will total ten and will use Tyler's rule of being made after 1880 but they will not be in any particular order.

Willem De Kooning: Excavation

This painting throws elbows. In its long term home at the Art Institute of Chicago, it rests amongst in a gallery featuring many great works including Pollock’s The Key, 1946, a great Matta, and a Smith Totem piece. The De Kooning dominates, takes over the room with its prudential frenzy, its tight lipped angst, and its heaving knobs and bones dancing a controlled boogie. These joints are what Clement Greenberg called “Homeless Representation,” bits of the human figure standing between you and the purity of abstraction. With the De Kooning, the bits are legs and arms and mouths. They bite. It wouldn’t be for another decade that Jasper Johns bite back.

As with all of the paintings on my list, this one has a story. During an ad hoc tour for some friends of mine about 5 years ago, I again declared the De Kooning the finest of all paintings. I was getting expressive. I was describing the scene in 1950 -- Pollock on the verge of his Life magazine article and not yet back on the bottle, the others Ab Exers still drinking and fighting at the Cedar Tavern, Gorky already dead for two years. World War II had been over for three years, and the drama in these painters lives came only from themselves. I told my friends how De Kooning was different from his contemporaries, more restrained, classically trained. I described the lines in Excavation, how they carve into the canvas like blades into a wood block. At that moment, a familiar voice, my Thesis Advisor David Raskin, said from behind me, “And why don’t you describe this painting for my class, what is the basic premise of the piece?”

Raskin’s entire graduate class stood behind me and apparently had been listening to my rapture. My friends exited into the next room, and I stood clumsily avoiding speaking clearly about the piece. What Raskin wanted me to say, and what I knew and couldn’t say was the word “Cubism.” And with that word and what it means, the structure of Excavation falls into place, it made sense, it becomes even more restrained, more classical, more controlled. Anytime I think about De Kooning’s career, how his dementia eventually caught up to him, and his, in the words of Roberta Smith, long slow goodbye to cubist structure, Excavation becomes a vibrant elegic monument.