Hirst’s Anatomy, Burning Man, The Pharmacist and Miami Flurry, 2024, dArt magazine pulp and paper, variously mounted on canvas, 8.5 x 7 inches. Citing the work of Damian Hirst, Matthew Ritchie, Micah Lexier, and Chris Scarborough.
Panel One in dArt Magazine Curated Content #4 depicts a tiny figure gazing up to a 20-foot colossus. Though Damien Hirst’s Hymn sculpture appears here with green grass and blue sky, it is in fact an installation view of Damien Hirst’s 2000 exhibition at Gagosian’s New York Chelsea gallery, the white disk and colors having here been added in oils. The full exhibition title was on the wordy side: Damien Hirst: Theories, Models, Methods, Approaches, Assumptions, Results and Findings. The review of the exhibition was covered for dArt by Clayton Campbell.
Steve Rockwell, Hopper’s Corn Hill, Stipl Squint, Jaan’s Divide, and John’s Paint Tip. 2024, dArt magazine pulp and paper, variously mounted on canvas, 8.5 x 7 inches. Citing the work of Edward Hopper, Richard Stipl, Jaan Poldaas, Barnett Newman, and Malcolm Arbuthnot (of Augustus John).
Hopper’s Corn Hill in the first panel makes use of an 1930 Edward Hopper oil that is part of the McNay Art Museum collection in San Antonio, Texas, of which I had a tour in 2005. The reproduction of the Truro, Cape Cod subject had occupied roughly the bottom half of the 8.5 x 7 inch page in dArt, which I had here expanded to the edges of the page in oils. It functions as an imaginary “framing” of what Hopper might have seen. The same device was used in the third panel, Jaan’s Divide, the original work by Jaan Poldaas, having been square, his stripes here extended to fill the rectangle. It was an adaptation to which the artist and I agreed for a dArt magazine back page to advertise his 1998 exhibition, Colours and Concepts.
The three stripes behind the image of Augustus John holding a brush allude to Barnett Newman’s 1967 Voice of Fire. The eighteen-foot acrylic on canvas had been a commission for Expo 67 in Montréal, Canada, and was part of the U.S. pavilion exhibition, American Painting Now, housed in a geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller. It is not known to what extent Newman incorporated the aspect of three in Voice of Fire, aware that the work would figure prominently within a dome constructed of triangles. On principle, Jaan Poldaas would have objected this employment of the “three,” as he revealed in a discussion that contributed to a review about his Colours and Concepts work.
The image of Richard Stipl‘s sculpted self-portrait heads (panel 2), was used for advertisement of the artist’s work in the Fall 2002 edition of dArt. With the title, The Sleep of Reason, Stipl references the Goya series of aquatints, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, an attribution generally read as Goya’s acceptance of Enlightenment values, that the absence of reason invites the monstrous to proliferate. Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, a German-Austrian sculptor most famous for his “character heads” was a contemporary of Goya, who produced a series of busts with contorted facial expressions, tapping into paranoid ideas and hallucinations from which he allegedly began to suffer. Messerschmidt and Stipl, it seems, would make for a formidable art history tag team.
Five artist temperaments are featured in Curated Content #3. Though an obvious correspondence could be made between the sculpted contortions of the faces by Stipl and Messerschmidt, an unlikely pairing would be Edward Hopper and Barnett Newman. Ralph Waldo Emerson had served as life-long touchstone to Hopper, his painting output imbued with an aura of the “transcendental.” In Peter Halley’s 1982 essay Ross Bleckner: Painting at the End of History, Halley ascribes the transcendentalist wing of modernism as having its roots in French Symbolism and Emerson, informing the work of Pollock, Rothko, and Newman.
With Malcolm Arbuthnot’s image of Augustus John, on the other hand, we have a stereotype of the typical “bohemian.” It is suggested that the character of eccentric painter Gully Jimson in the 1958 Alec Guiness film The Horse’s Mouth was modelled on John.
As the World Grinds, Pulp Ladle, dArt Burger, and The Bunny Show. Citing the work of Andre Ethier, Ben Marshall, Ginette Legare, Saeed Mohamed, James Cooper, Steve Rockwell, and Katharine T. Carter.
The 2011 Making Minced Meat Out of dArt Magazine exhibition at De Luca Fine Art in Toronto introduced the dArt Burger to the city. Saeed Mohamed served it at his restaurant. Co-producer Ben Marshall insisted we install an actual meat grinder in the show. Gallery attendees were served the edible burgers, as the wall mounted print shards were available for visual ingestion. For James Cooper’s film of the making of the dArt Burger click here.
The image in Ginette Legaré’s Pulp Ladle (originally Scoop from the 1998 Feeding Disorder series) was transferred from the Fall 1998 edition dArt onto the dArt magazine pulp panel. Legaré’s constructions comprise of reconfigured found objects, out which meaning is teased as distilled language. Her recent “Supply Chains” exhibition at Birch Contemporary speaks to a time when links to the network of things necessary or desirable to our lives may unexpectedly show strain. Andre Ethier’s Atlas portrays the globe-bearing Titan in a state of perpetual stress – a punishment levied by Zeus after defeat in battle.
The Bunny Show image was created for Katharine T. Carter & Associates, a public relations and marketing firm for artists. It’s a view of the museum interior visualized as a rabbit artist might see it – a full retrospective with ample carrots.
Dead Idiot, Penck’s Passage, Richter Scale, and Card Players. Citing the work of Paul Pretzer, Mamma Andersson, Kurt Schwitters, A.R. Penck, Hannah Hoch, Gerhard Richter, Otto Dix, and Julian Schnabel.
A reading of the Curated Content #2 group of images may require the passage over something that Maurice Blanchot calls the “empty deep.” The Richter Scale image in the group had been the cover for the Fall 2002 edition of dArt magazine, featuring author Bruce Bauman’s review of Gerhard Richter’s exhibition at the MoMA in New York. Bauman conceded that seeing the retrospective forced him to reevaluate why he wrote about art. Bauman’s full article here.
In his search for, what cannot be put into words, Bauman arrives at what he calls, “the necessity of art: the search for that space in each individual for the longing for the lost god, for meaning, for beauty, humanity – the quest for truth which is our soul. In falling into that empty deep we can truly confront that terribleness of human history, the horror and little cruelties that live within us all.”
Paul Pretzer, Dead Idiot, oil on wood, 17.1 x 15 inches. Courtesy of Marc Straus Gallery
A tiny antagonist buzzes over the skull of Paul Pretzer’s Dead Idiot. The painting was part of Mortality: A Survey of Contemporary Death Art. Curated by Donald Kuspit, and assisted by Robert Curcio, the exhibition was to be held at the American University Museum in Washington, D.C. in 2020, but was terminated due to Covid-19. Since the exhibition catalog had already been produced, the show’s virtual life was extended as the 2021 dArt cover feature, in the sense that the Curated Content project had also breathed life into it. If Pretzer’s Dead Idiot is a focus on mortality as an individual struggle, the Otto Dix Card Players (1920) in panel four exemplify its residual collective trauma. The black card with Julian Schnabel’s portrait of a scarred Andy Warhol, deals the irony of someone who survived an assassination attempt, only to fall victim to a scalpel in the hospital.
A.R. Penck’s stick figure with outstretched arms embodies survival, literally here a trial by fire and tightrope in his 1963 oil Passage. The work was part of Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures (article by Emese Hajagos) and addresses the wider sociopolitical impacts of war, whether hot or cold.
