‘Painting is what paint does’: Milton Resnick at Mana Contemporary

Milton Resnick’s paintings are arresting. The images are hard won. The surfaces are tactile and weighty. They have presence.

A major survey exhibition of Resnick’s work on view at Mana Contemporary through August 8, 2014. This exhibition, Milton Resnick (1917-2004): Paintings and Works on Paper from the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, spans over a half century of the artist’s work. Resnick emigrated to New York from Russia in the 1920s, participated in the WPA Artists’ Project, and befriended Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, John Graham, and other downtown artists. He was drafted into the army during WWII, then returned to New York in 1945. His abstract paintings placed him firmly in the first generation of abstract expressionists. In the 70s and 80s, he created allover compositions with increasingly dense paint applications. The resulting works have a “topographical presence” and emphasize the materiality of paint above all else. Works from this period are exhibited in the first floor gallery space at Mana. The exhibit continues on another level, where several of his early works from the 1950s are grouped with later figurative works of the 90s and 00s. Resnick died in 2004 in New York, and his wife, the painter Pat Passlof died in 2011, establishing the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation in her will.

Milton Resnick, Mana Contemporary installation view

Milton Resnick, Mana Contemporary, Installation view

Ever since I first encountered Resnick’s works at Cheim & Read in Chelsea, I’ve craved seeing more of his paintings. The few exhibition catalogues I could find of his work are rare and out of print (with the exception of Milton Resnick: A Question of Seeing: Paintings 1959-1963, published in 2008 by Cheim & Read). In the late 90s, a televised portrait of Resnick aired on PBS, A World of Art: Works in Progress: Milton Resnick and (Works in Progress: Milton Resnick, Part 2). It provides a glimpse into his painting process, his life with Pat Passlof on the Lower East Side, and many of his insights into the medium of oil paint. “Painting is what paint does. You have to be the straw in the wind and listen to what the master, paint, tells you to do.”

Milton Resnick, Sphinx

Milton Resnick

Milton Resnick

Given the longevity of Resnick’s career, it is surprising that this show at Mana is the first major East Coast exhibition of Resnick’s work. Perhaps Resnick isn’t more widely known precisely because his paintings demand being experienced in person. He uses paint as a visual medium rather than as a vehicle for presenting ideas; since the paintings don’t explicitly express intellectual concepts, they don’t lend themselves to written discourse. Furthermore, in our age of mechanical (now digital) reproduction, we’ve become accustomed to slick images that are easy to represent with digital surrogates. There’s something to be said for the cult of the original, for authenticity, and for experiential understanding. Resnick is that breed of painter’s painter whose work warrants firsthand knowledge.

Resnick, installation view

Milton Resnick, Mana Contemporary, Installation view

Resnick

Visiting the Resnick show at Mana Contemporary is a pilgrimage of sorts. Firstly, you must take the PATH train (which isn’t that difficult, it turns out). Secondly, you cannot view the show without a guided tour. Due to the peculiarities of the gargantuan space, this procedure makes perfect sense, and isn’t at all a deterrent to seeing the art work at your leisure. When I went to view the exhibit, our guide explained some of Mana Contemporary’s features to the group. The enormous space is a work in progress, with a combination of galleries, studios, printing presses, and art storage. Its beginnings as an art storage facility have influenced the exhibitions, including this current ambitious show of Resnick’s paintings. Apparently, Resnick’s work was being stored at Mana, and one of the curatorial missions is to showcase artists whose works are in storage there. The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation will be opening a museum on 87 Eldridge Street in the Lower East Side in a synagogue that was Resnick’s studio from 1977 until his death in 2004. The museum is scheduled to open in 2016 and will provide an exhibition space for works by Milton Resnick and his wife, Pat Passlof, as well as the study of other abstract expressionists.

Milton Resnick, Mana Contemporary, works on paper

installation view

 

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Kentridge’s Refusal of Time X 3

“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once,” Einstein said pithily. It certainly takes more than once to digest all the complexities and theatricality of William Kentridge’s five-channel video installation “The Refusal of Time,” a work that takes on Einstein’s theory of the relativity of time. Over a span of two years, I’ve had the opportunity to see the work installed in three venues, and multiple viewings are necessary to process the multi-sensory delights of the piece. Recently, I saw installations of  “The Refusal of Time” at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, MA, and at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, NY. The first time I saw this piece was at dOCUMENTA 13 in Kassel, Germany, the exhibit at which the work premiered. This poignant work is a reflection on time, space, memory, colonialism, and scientific history. The imagery comes from myriad sources: Einstein’s experiments with clocks, the artist himself, books, text, dancers, silent film, physics. In short, it is a grand piece and addresses grand themes. This vigilance toward tackling the “big issues” is a worthy enterprise that few artists attempt, and even fewer manage as deftly as Kentridge. Since the work itself has been widely discussed elsewhere, I’d like to focus my commentary on the material aspects of these three installations.

William Kentridge, Refusal of Time, 2012

Kentridge, who still lives and works in his native South Africa, trained as a painter and printmaker, and produces muti-media works that span film, theater, collage, sound, and sculpture. Kentridge is perhaps best known for his style of stop-motion animation in which he makes charcoal drawings that he alters numerous times, photographing each iteration in order to create individual scenes. The resulting images contain all the traces of the artist’s hand, the erasures, and transformations that underscore the agent of time in the work. In 2010, the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted a major exhibition of the artist’s works, and their website offers a wealth of background information on Kentridge’s work, his biography, and his process. He discusses his methods in this clip on MoMA’s interactive Kentridge website.

William Kentridge, Refusal of Time, at dOCUMENTA 13, 2012

For “The Refusal of a Time,” Kentridge brilliantly married the hand-made marks of his charcoal drawings with live action film, a musical score, and installation. In the videos and accompanying sculpture – a breathing machine called the elephant, which alludes to a Dickensian anxiety over industry- he addresses changing conceptions of time throughout history. This central theme of the work resulted from a collaboration between Kentridge and Peter Galison, professor of History of Science at Harvard University. The vision that emerged from their conversations was then realized with the aid of video filmmaker Catherine Meyburgh and composer Phillip Miller. Philip Miller’s soundscape features a metronomic beat, instrumentation, and spoken word, to convey the varied pace of the modern city and different manifestations of time. Kentridge describes the work in this video on the Met’s website.

In the three installations of “The Refusal of Time” at dOCUMENTA 13, the ICA, and the Met, the biggest variable was the degree to which the physical space reinforced the content of the piece. That is to say, the various spaces evoke different ideas about time. The Hauptbahnhof, the train station in Kassel where the work was shown originally, conveys a more fragmented notion of time in industrialized society than a museum like the Met can convey, with its air of permanence, its temple-like architecture, and its hallowed galleries of art spanning the long trajectory of human history. The ICA has yet other temporal qualities, being a relatively new structure. The raw unfinished look of walls and ceilings did not seem forced in the ICA, but typical of such galleries. Exposed sheet rock gave the feeling of a construction site, albeit a manicured one. The floors and ceiling fixtures had a regular grid pattern unlike the haphazard scuffs at the Met or the natural cracks and texture of the Hauptbahnhof. The main drawback at the Met was the size of the space because it required the five videos to be projected smaller, and the main drawback at the ICA was simply the starkness of the space.

William Kentridge, Refusal of Time, at dOCUMENTA 13, 2012

William Kentridge, Refusal of Time, at the Metropolitan Museum, 2014

William Kentridge, Refusal of Time, at the ICA

William Kentridge, Refusal of Time, ICA

Why did the work function better in the Hauptbahnhof? As any student of 19th-century history knows, the tyranny of time originated with the railroad. The space of the train station was more than double the size of the other two installations of the work in Boston and New York, and it was imbued with its own sense of industrialized time and the patina of age. The context fits the subject exceedingly well. Mechanized clocks and schedules all are due to the railroad.

‘Her whistle shrieks like a thousand fiends let loose upon the night,’ article from The London Bulletin about 19th-century railroads & an advertisement for Great Western Railway

Time gained increased significance with the trains. As train stations go, the Hauptbahnhof in Kassel has all the hallmarks of age. Its worn and textured brick walls painted white in the center gave the video installation added visual interest. In both the Met and the ICA, the look of a well-worn space was contrived. Sheets of dry wall were propped against the gallery walls to form the projection surface. Painters tape was semi-attached on places along the walls, and scuffs and tape marks were added to the floors. Undoubtedly, some of the elements in the room at the dOCUMENTA installation were purposeful, carefully-crafted marks designed to look authentic to the space. However, this contrivance was more expertly concealed. The chairs were bolted down at dOCUMENTA, imposing the artists optimum viewing environment- one of perfect casualness. It appeared as though viewers throughout the day had moved and arranged chairs at whim. In contrast both the ICA and the Met chose to use tape marks on the floor to map the chair arrangements. There was no attempt to hide the predetermined layout of the rooms.

Installation view at the Met

Installation view at the Met

Floor detail at the Met

To be fair, the installations at the ICA and the Met did try to conjure the sense of the artist’s studio by adding some of the trappings of a work space. The viewer’s encounter was one of stumbling into a studio where work was being made in haste and the makers had just left. That was a rather successful way to work with the particulars of a given space. The two museum galleries were half the size of the space in the Hauptbahnhof. Naturally, the larger space allowed the videos to be bigger and the sound to be louder. The metal cones that carried the sound and the central machine sculpture were the same in all three exhibitions. However, the larger video projections in the Hauptbahnhof created a more seamless transition in cases like the parade sequence, in which characters march around the room screen to screen. The wider gaps from screen to screen in the two museum installs yielded a quite different viewing experience.

Another main difference among these installations was the ICA’s adjacent exhibition of Kentridge’s drawings. It was a pleasure to see the video work in relation to his works on paper, and helped position the installation within the larger context of the artist’s work. Of the three, the installation at the Met is the only one that is a newly-acquired part of the museum’s permanent collection. While part of me would have liked to see “The refusal of Time” installed somewhere in the Greek & Roman Galleries or near the Temple of Dendur to capitalize on that special relationship to time that only an institution like the Met has, it’s understandable that a permanent installation must be in the contemporary galleries for pragmatic reasons. It’s laudable that the Met has acquired this ambitious video work, and last week the museum received an AICA-USA Arts Awards for Excellence in Curatorial Achievement in the time-based media category.​ While the Met’s installation closed in May, they do provide a rich online source about this video work, MetCollects.

The strength of the work isn’t reliant on any one particular kind of space. It’s engaging and provocative despite the minor differences from one exhibition to another. Since it was created for the Hauptbahnhof, it understandably functioned best there. Among the many delights at dOCUMENTA, this work was probably the one that delighted me most (along with Charlotte Salomon’s drawings, which I’ll work my way around to discussing in some future post), and it was well worth seeing again… and again.

There may be hope: two painting shows in Chelsea

“The whole thing of should I paint or not, is painting dead—of course it’s not.” That is a delightfully dismissive statement by Glenn Brown in an interview in 2009 in Art in America. Of course it’s not. It’s that simple, really, and the two painting shows I saw last weekend in Chelsea are a rousing testimony to the vivacity of oil paint: Glenn Brown at Gagosian, and  Hannah van Bart at Marianne Boesky. (Had time permitted, the Maria Lassnig show at PS1 would have completed my art pilgrimage and made a satisfying triumvirate of figurative painters. The Maria Lassnig show is up through September 7th though, so there’s still time).

Glenn Brown, In My Time of Dying, 2014

British painter Glenn Brown says in the press release for the current show at Gagosian, “I like my paintings to have one foot in the grave, to be not quite of this world.” My artistic sensibilities so align with his – the indebtedness to art history, the love of the language of oil paint – that I’m thrilled to have finally gotten to see his work in person. The paintings on view are all oil on panel, and the surfaces are luscious and luminous. Brown revels in all the medium can do; blurred areas of atmospheric calm set off the vigorous dizzying (but controlled) brushwork that tends to be reserved for the central subject of each piece. The paint is applied thinly and methodically. I expected the surfaces to be like Auerbach’s with thick impasto instead of such polished surfaces. As the artist himself said, while he admires de Kooning or Soutine, he paints more slowly, which lends itself to more refined results. Brown traffics in the widely-recognized themes and stories of myth, of the Bible, and of art history, and people relate to it. It’s truly refreshing to think we can all put notions about there being no meta-narratives behind us. His mastery of the medium is exuberant and deeply satisfying on many levels.

Glenn Brown, Cactus Land, 2012

The works in the Gagosian show included several bronze and oil painted sculptures, all of which related to the art historical epochs alluded to in the paintings. With titles like “Magdalena Penitente” and “Nazareth” or “Romantic Movement,” the foothold in the artistic achievements of the past is apparent.

Glenn Brown, installation view, Gagosian Galley, 2014

Glenn Brown, installation view, Gagosian Gallery, 2014

Hannah van Bart deals directly with nostalgia and human memory in her work, but in a decidedly different way from Glenn Brown. With a more muted palette, Van Bart uses vintage photos as her source, and alters them with a characteristic nervous line and sensitive brushwork. The images are re-worked numerous times until the original reference is supplanted by the painter’s decisions about the subject’s portrayal. For a glimpse inside her studio in Amsterdam, watch this interview with Hannah Van Bart on 4 Art on Kunstuur from March 2014: 4 Art – Hannah Van Bart.

Hannah Van Bart, Doubt, 2013

Van Bart’s portrait exhibition at Marianne Boesky featured approximately 15 paintings (all pictured on the gallery website), all oil on linen. The works included are refreshingly modest in scale and scope. Her paintings have a tactile surface that I find pleasing. It’s nice to see evidence of the human hand’s involvement in the creation of anything, especially since so much imagery we see every day is super-slick and created by the press of a button. Although the brushwork is evident, the surfaces are all rather flat. Despite the use of outline around the figures, there’s a a satisfying interplay between the figure and the ground. With palette choice, patterns, grids, textures, and undoubtedly many other formal concerns that I overlooked, Van Bart uses all the elements of picture-making to connect the space inside the figure to its surrounding areas.

Hannah Van Bart, installation view, Marianne Boesky Gallery, 2014

Hannah Van Bart, installation view, Marianne Boesky Gallery, 2014

There’s a line in Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway that I read years ago while working on my MFA in painting in New York, “Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt.”  It resonated with me at the time, as I was trying to make big splashy clever paintings. When I see work like Glenn Brown’s, which seems to originate from a sense of enjoyment and intellectual curiosity, or Hannah Van Bart’s, which seems utterly human and self-searching, this quotation springs to mind. Their work is felt. While these two shows both close June 14th, there are a few other choices for happy hopeful art pilgrims. Next up for me will be Maria Lassnig at PS1 (as I already mentioned) and Milton Resnick at Mana Contemporary.

Hannah Van Bart, Man, 2014