More [email protected] Dashboard Sign Out Left Bank Art Blog Thursday, August 22, 2013 Art World Matters Dance at Socrates Sculpture Park How to Make a Living as an Artist Art as a Gift By Charles Kessler The Art World as a Subculture Art and Government Art and Entertainment Why I Quit Painting Gallery and Museum Guides Current Bushwick Exhibitions Washington D.C. Museum Guide Small Museums on Manhattan's East Side Small Museums on Manhattan's West Side The Philadelphia Museum of Art The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia Most Viewed Posts African Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art By Charles Kessler I was disappointed I didn’t get to see the Tishman/Disney collection of African art when I went to Washington last week... Sydney Schiff Dance Project, August 17, 2013, Socrates Sculpture Park. The Chauvet Cave Norte Maar is sponsoring a series of free outdoor dance performances at Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Paintings Island City. The performances take place at 3pm every Saturday afternoon in August, but you can also go By Charles Kessler during the week and watch the dancers rehearse, and you can talk to the different choreographers as they The other day, I saw Werner work on their dances. I went to the first two performances, and they were exhilarating, especially the Herzog’s new 3-D movie about Gleich Dancers. There are two dances left – try to go if you can. The whole experience was an absolute the Chauvet cave paintings — Cave of Forgotten Dreams (now delight. pl... Peter Voulkos and the Ceramics Revolution of the 1950s By Charles Kessler As I noted in a recent post , ceramics, as an art medium rather than a utilitarian craft, has become popular with arti... Sculptures of Bulls at the Metropolitan Museum of Art By Charles Kessler Often, as if there's a theme for the day, one thing or another seems to stand out when I visit a museum. I already ... David Park: California Dreaming By Carl Belz Writer’s note: The following essay was written for the brochure of a 1983 David Park exhibition at the Salander- O’Reilly Ga... Matisse's Cut-Outs Gleich Dancers, Selection from Speak Easy Secrets, Dance at Socrates, August 10, 2013. as Environments By Charles Kessler Here you are in a beautiful park – naturally beautiful, not manicured – that's situated on the East River A major exhibition overlooking Manhattan, with trees and large sculptures scattered about. Plus you get to watch of Henri Matisse's cut-outs is now in London at the extraordinarily skilled dancers up close. You can't have a more pleasant experience – at least in New Tate Modern and will be traveling York in August. to the Mu... Washington — Day I've been seeing a lot of dance lately, and I've come to the conclusion that dance is magical in a way no Two other art form (except possibly opera) can duplicate. Real live people (okay, younger and thinner) fly, or By Charles Kessler FREER/SACKLER are effortlessly lifted in the air as if they weigh nothing; and their movements are more graceful (even Museums of Asian when they try to be awkward), and certainly more interesting, than ordinary people's. Sure, flying and all Art What a classy museum the kinds of fantastic things happen in movies, but it's not live. In addition, a lot of dance is joyous and Freer is! It's the only museum I went to that didn'... ebullient – something that hardly exists anymore in painting and sculpture, unfortunately. Mithila Painting Then there's Socrates Sculpture Park itself. In the early eighties it was an illegal dump – an abandoned Ranti Women's Art Coop By Charles four-acre wasteland. In 1986 the sculptor Mark di Suvero brought together a group of artists and people Kessler There’s a from the area to clean it up with the idea of making it into an informal community park and a place kind of art that has where sculptors could make and exhibit their art. When I first started going there in the late eighties, it characteristics of folk art, tribal art, tourist art and ... was still pretty raw and didn't look much different from the photo below. Dancing with the Devil Lynne Cheney, wife of former (thank God) Vice President Dick Cheney, National Endowment for the Arts chair in the mid-1980's Most ... The High Line -- WOW! (Click on a photo to enlarge it) For those of you who don’t know, the High Line is an elevated steel railway trestle built in the 1930’s. I... Writers: Charles Kessler (315) Carl Belz (44) Irene Borngraeber (25) Kyle Gallup (12) Archives ► 2016 (1) ► 2015 (30) ► 2014 (35) ▼ 2013 (39) ► December (2) ► November (3) ► October (4) ► September (3) ▼ August (3) Dance at Socrates Socrates Sculpture Park before it was developed. (Photo from the Socrates Sculpture Park website.) Sculpture Park Now it's an official New York City park with an ambitious exhibition schedule and a residency program Tales of Two that not only supplies space for emerging sculptors to make and exhibit their work, but also provides Artists: Alex Katz and Eric access to facilities, materials, equipment, on-site staff expertise, AND a $5,000 grant. It's much nicer Fischl now in a lot of ways, but I miss the exciting entrepreneurial anarchy of the old days. Los Angeles Artists In New York This Summer ► July (3) ► June (4) ► May (1) ► April (4) ► March (3) ► February (4) ► January (5) ► 2012 (63) ► 2011 (94) ► 2010 (132) ► 2009 (82) Anthony Heinz May, one of the 2013 Emerging Artist Fellows, working on his sculpture. So if you go to the dance performances or rehearsals in August, take the opportunity to look at the sculptures that are in the process of being built, and maybe talk to some of the sculptors. Details: The address: 32-01 Vernon Boulevard at Broadway, Long Island City (Queens), NY 11106. Directions: During the week both the Q and N trains will get you there, but on weekends ONLY the N train goes there. Get off at the Broadway stop in Long Island City, Queens, and either walk eight blocks west on Broadway (toward the East River – 3/4 mile according to Google Maps, about a 15 minute walk) until it dead-ends at Vernon Boulevard, or take the Broadway bus which comes by about every 10 minutes. Hours: Open every day from 10 am until sunset. You can also easily go to the Noguchi Museum, only a block away on Vernon Blvd. at 33rd Road, and make a day of it. Isamu Naguchi Museum Garden. Posted by Left Bank Art Blog at 6:01 PM No comments: Sunday, August 18, 2013 Tales of Two Artists: Alex Katz and Eric Fischl By Carl Belz Invented Symbols by Alex Katz. Charta/Colby College Museum of Art, 2012. Bad Boy: My Life On And Off The Canvas by Eric Fischl and Michael Stone. Crown, 2012. How do we currently write current art’s history? How, given its elastic chronology and ever-widening geographic reach, its self-consciously elusive look, the multiple urges and identities and media it comprises? How, in the absence of a canon of artists around whom a history might be structured, its sources and development traced, its context established, its achievements described? How, in the face of its censure on quality distinctions, its scapegoating of formalism, its dismissal of originality and artistic intent? How, in other words, do we write art’s history within the broader context of postmodernism’s prevailing hegemony? Our unwieldy culture and its academic strictures increasingly nudge us to write the history of current art not from the outside in but from the inside out, personally and informally, more often than not via the autobiography and the memoir, genres rooted in direct experience that is unique to the individual writer. In doing so, our voices may be unauthorized by institutional structures, but likewise are they unfettered by those structures and the conventions they embody. In the publications considered here those voices richly inform our understanding not of any classroom theory about art’s making but of its day-to-day studio practice – the actual source material upon which any history of painting during the second half of the 20th Century in New York City must ultimately be based. Alex Katz, Ted Berrigan, 1967, oil on linen, 48 x 48 inches (photo courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York). A pair of distinctly separate generations overlap in bringing those years freshly before us. Born in 1927, Alex Katz grew up in an “off-the-boat” Russian-Jewish family in St. Albans, Queens in the 1940s. He first encountered art at the Woodrow Wilson Vocational High School where “you could do artwork for three or four hours a day, and they’d didn’t really care what you did” – pursued it seriously at Cooper Union after serving in the Navy, and then steadily brought his work and his career to early maturity during the 1950s within the legendary hothouse environment of low budget, artist-run galleries such as Tanager and Hansa on 10th Street in downtown Manhattan. Eric Fischl, Sleepwalker, 1979, oil on canvas, 69 x 105 inches. Fast forward 20 years to Eric Fischl, born in 1948. His childhood was spent in Port Washington – ”a leafy suburb on the north shore of Long Island” – and he grew up in the 1960s living “on the cusp of privilege” that was “designed to paper over our family disfunction.” He stumbled through private school in Maryland, “escaped” for a year to Waynesburg College near Pittsburgh that ended in failure, and first tried art at a community college in Phoenix – his family had moved there in 1967 – ”because – well, nobody fails art.” He painted for a year at Arizona State but developed his art in earnest during the 1970s, first at the California Institute of the Arts, his own generation’s hothouse environment, where he earned his BFA; in Chicago, where he was impressed by the countercultural Hairy Who; and then at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where he taught for four years before moving to New York in 1978.