Vertical Thoughts: Morton Feldman and the Visual Arts @ IMMA

The current marquee exhibition at IMMA is strangely high-concept. Based around the collection of minimalist composer and Ab-Ex scenester Morton Feldman, the show is a welcome opportunity to see some high-water American mid-century abstraction along with some, um, rugs.

Feldman's relationship with the irascible set (and the strong influence of post-war NY painting on the development of his compositional style) has meant that Feldman's music has become the de facto soundtrack to late American modernism. This relationship seems crystallized in the use of his music in scoring Hans Namuth's short films of Pollock's and de Kooning's studios, among the most iconic documents of the Abstract Expressionist generation, as well as his elegiac Rothko Chapel.

I had given myself the idea that this was going to include some Barnett Newman's and I was disappointed that it didn't, I also kinda felt like there was a lot of talk about the Pollocks, but as far as i remember, there were only two (one I can't remember at all, the other was absolutely stunning, the name escapes me, but it was enamel and gesso on paper, and had a pulsing lyricism I don't normally expect from Pollock, especially on a small scale)

Feldman's artistic and personal relationship with the New York art scene, ends up providing a really subtle and interesting structure for the show, especially as big, blue chip shows like this can often feel bulky and white-elephantish, the inclusion of the aforementioned Namuth films, as well as a (really hypnotic) film of Mondrian's last studio, helped flesh out and illuminate the overlapping artistic narratives, alluded to in, for eg., a little Philip Guston drawing dedicated to "mortyfeldman" or naming a piece after critic/poet/fire-island casualty Frank O'Hara. I mean a major problem I have with this sometimes is that, and this is really tempting for somebody like me who is a bit too romantic about this era, it becomes way too fetishistic about '50s NYC as a kind of garrulous bohemia, too author-centric, too nostalgic.

A nice thing to be able to say though, is that the work in the show is so top notch that it makes those criticisms feel pretty irrelevent. The Towering Franz Kline for eg. is really virtuoso and thrilling in a way that you don't really see anymore, its dexterity amplified by a thrilling lack of futzing around. Which is funny because the put it right next to a Philip Guston where a gnawing indecision seems to be the only structure for the canvas. (this pairing is pretty much the highlight of the show, and pretty much all the Guston's in this show are awesome and revelatory for me) where rash-like, inflamed reds and pinks disintegrate like a tissue used as a cloth into a meaty dead flesh grey (giving off weirdly ectoplasmic turqoise halos).

Elsewhere, more ink drawings by Guston, some of them feeling real contemporary, have a kind of half-interested verve, that is, a dashed off yet fine-pointed facility with line and an easy way of electrifying a page.

I don't really know what else to say, it is a major disappointment that the final room is a collection of rugs he bought. I mean I guess the curators felt they really needed to the biographical concept of the show, but I really care more about it being a good show to be honest, which, I mean, it was.

Show Runs until 27th June

PHILLIPE PARRENO @ IMMA

This was kind of fun. Just a good old fashioned head fuck in my opinion. Okay there were easy points made on the deconstructive potential of cultural detritus but I was more interested in how it used the space, activated it, moved around it. The voice of the woman from the video piece that echoed and careened through the rooms of the gallery The yellowing of the windows and the shiny things. It was a bit empty, but it was entertaining, and you could see the whole thing in a few minutes. Great info sheet too, like a randomly torn page from one of those Phaidon books.

LYNDA BENGLIS @ IMMA

Feel like there's an essay in the works on this one, so I'll keep it brief here. This was a great show and one of the reasons that IMMA have been restoring a lot of my previous faith in them after a dodgy couple of years. Lynda Benglis, best known for her ARTFORUM ad featuring her wearing nothing but sunglasses and an, um, dildo, emerged as a figure from the New York Painting Scene of the late 60's early 70's. Thankfully this period has overgone a huge reappraisal in recent years with figures as diverse as Mary Heilmann and Joan Mitchell re-emerging as important and influential. Benglis' work from this period is aggressively feminist in rhetoric, but in its lush materialism and sly disruption of formalism, seems to anticipate queer 90's artists Felix Gonzalez Torres (pro tip for blog readers, if I align anybody with FGT it means I am about to say I like them) and Roni Horn.

I suppose it would be suitable to cite Robert Morris or Judy Chicago, both artists whose awareness of the gendered rhetoric of Minimalism in particular informed their work (Chicago, before she embraced large installations on feminist themes, made quietly prettified Minimalist sculpture) Neither of these artists approached the formal subversion of Benglis though, her flamboyant and gaudy sculptures deconstruct the maleness of the previous decades of american art, the ejaculations of Jackson Pollock and the cool supermensch boy-toys of minimalism, and remake them as bawdy, excessive and bodacious visions of camp femaleness.

Working with latex, wax, plaster, glitter and vibrant acrylics, much of the show has the appearance of Mardi-Gras float casualties (especially due to the repeated use of chicken wire to give many sculptures structure) But it is in this free-floating garishness that the artist stumbles across her radicalness, her affront to bourgeois tastefulness. While her work is lacking in the nuance and subtlety of Mary Heilmann, it makes up for it with sheer willpower. Considering how long it has taken this period of recent history to become canonised, her aggressiveness seems justified yet how odd to think that in a world where Warhol was the most famous living artist, that it took so long for this post-pop abstraction to gain respectability. Still, it is in its persistant un respectability that this show is so much fun, in all its kinky, rubbery trashiness.

TERRY WINTERS @ IMMA

Signal to Noise is the name IMMA's curators have chosen for their recent retrospective of the painters last ten years. Held in the same wing of the museum that has over the last few years hosted large retrospectives for Juan Úsle and Howard Hodgkin and, like them, Winters has a canny knack for sublimating imagery into his large, dense compositions. According to the press release: "The 40 paintings and drawings explore the cerebral spaces of information technology and issues of cognition and narration as they relate to abstract painting." The exhibition barely makes a strong case for its premise, as shapes, figures, motifs and patterns are reintroduced remodelled, rearticulated and eventually dismantled through the painters brash and probing brushwork.

Not that it starts that promisingly, the first paintings we see are of more modest size and their tentative games with alternating narration of positive and negative space, seems like a big commotion over not much. The ideas of space articulated just aren't interesting enough to sustain the bombastic streaks of paint that criss-cross the canvases.

But then something changes, we move into the smaller rooms, where monochrome prints display a nice feel for placement, a certain crude brashness which is effective in ways it doesn't seem to be in paint. the rough scribble that he uses in place of hatching has a childlike charm and a crooked violence. The sheer number of them on the wall forces the curators point about information systems in overload but its obviousness is effective in a way that echos the prints themselves.



Terry Winters - In Blue

Suddenly the large canvases reappear, but this time, in such wild colour that they seem garish and overwhelming even without being rammed together from floor to ceiling. Mainly composed of large floating grids of rose-like configurations of space and spirograph designs. In the larger pieces the variations of the rose patterns bursts into three dimensions as they push and pull against each other and the picture plane, swirling around each other.