Philip Guston

Why does his ugly, deliberately crude late work so enduring and compelling? does it resonate with people outside america? (the imagery seems to spring from a very american kind of psychological claustrophobia)

he was a great mentor to remy in ratatouille, dunno why anyone would think differently

as a Yurpeen I like Guston, yes!

i know the late work less well and like it less than his pure abstractions but that's probably Feldman's fault for brainwashing me

The imagery is crude, the painting is not.

the transitional moment in the mid-60s - all the dark grey ones when you start to see forms emerging in the ether is utterly hypnotic.

There are few painters I have studied with the continued enthusiasm and sustaining curiosity as I have for PG

The abstractions are great, how they always get denser toward the center. But it’s the eyeballs and klan masks and spindly limbs that I can’t ever forget. The art of failing health, in sickly pinks and grays. As soon as I saw these paintings—in europe somewhere, ten years ago—i never forgot his name. I forget which country I was in but i remembered “philip guston.”

I like the nixon cartoons too. Making his cheeks into testicles emphasizes his vulnerability, interestingly, but not in a way that inspires sympathy. These are difficult works I think—it’s not just a one note joke even though they’re humorous

the retrospective I saw at SF MoMA (wanna say about 15 yrs ago?) did a really good job of exhibition design to show how the work both changed and contained similar attributes over time ...

the pink dystopia with the kkk hoods and the bloodshot eyes feels prophetic now

yes, and the boots, clocks, pointing fingers

the pink dystopia with the kkk hoods and the bloodshot eyes feels prophetic now

Yes, but not quite in the way you intuited:

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/sep/26/sense-or-censorship-row-over-klan-images-in-tates-postponed-show

See also:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/national-gallery-postponement-of-philip-guston-show-was-a-mistake/2020/09/27/9b3c6082-003f-11eb-8d05-9beaaa91c71f_story.html

oh get fucked galleries and this sham "danger of misinterpretation" bollocks - what a joke.

We also need a moratorium on performances of Julius Eastman's works due to their unquotable titles. Surely this would go a long way towards mending race relations in the US.

Godfrey, who organised the Tate Modern’s runaway hit Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, posted on Instagram that the decision “is actually extremely patronising to viewers, who are assumed not to be able to appreciate the nuance and politics of Guston’s works”.

are all art shows from now on to work on the premise that most visitors just want to see hack RA Sunday painters doing trad representational paintings of good honest folk and all other art belongs to the forthcoming Entartete "Kunst" show.

Being challenged by an artwork might just turn viewers into racists, which they totally weren't to begin with. Better stop representing racism altogether, just to be on the safe side.

the art world is completely in thrall to some of the narrowest version of left orthodoxy. i think this is especially true in the uk, sadly. last year i interviewed the head curator of one of london's leading museums and each of his answers was just a platitude. i'd email him a question, and--not to be mean--but nothing he said was at all original or insightful. his goal was to "challenge" and "decolonize" the "space" and question the "representation" of "bodies," perhaps "in the gallery space."

i think there might be some logic in the way visual art must be accompanied by the most artless language imaginable. it's like some form of institutional control. if the reigning ideology wasn't leftist it would be something else. you know, 19th century "academic" painting was at least as arid.

art is anarchic. it must be contextualized, pinned to the wall like a suffocating butterfly.

oh tbf a lot of these neo-volkisch tory/ukip voting lads have already proven themselves to be very corruptible ingenues who probably couldn't read a work of art for shit. Good job the actual odds of them turning up at a Guston show is about 60 fucking zillion to one!

As a casual observer, I get the sense that contemporary art is especially beholden to theoretical discourse, as though it were of prime importance for the work to be readily translatable into verbal concepts of a political nature – the less ambiguous the better.

although tbf I do worry that some decent tories, that might even have Art History "A" level qualifications might not understand the context of a Jewish artist, whose family fled pogroms, portraying fascists!

as someone who worked in "the art world" for two years i can confirm that this is very much the case. and despite the fact that a lot of this theoretical discourse is "left wing" nominally i think this issue arises from the fact that the art world is very money driven.

like, the language of the art world is designed to confer importance onto objects, or justify their value to collectors. so there is an element of mystification involved with this kind of language, that's its purpose.

like, check this instagram caption, from "blue chip" gallery almine rech:

alminerech
Verified
« #JeffKoons’ Gazing Ball (Bottlerack), 2016, which stands roughly three feet high and slightly wider than one foot, is one of the most concise and direct expressions of Jeff Koons’ iconic œuvre. It distills his historic aesthetic, foregrounds his artistic lineage and perspective, and points to the future in a way unlike any other work he has created. »
•
Explore ‘One by One: Jeff Koons’ online via our link in bio! Until September 30th
•
Jeff Koons, Gazing Ball (Bottlerack), 2016
Galvanized steel and glass
91,4 x 40,5 x 40,5 cm
36 x 15 15/16 x 15 15/16 in
Edition of 3 + 1 AP

There's a lack of, dare I say, self-respect involved in such an attitude, although I suspect market forces and a pressing need for an audience at all costs partly explain it. This is a problem for other artistic (broadly speaking) fields, of course, but the visual arts seem to have gotten the short end of the stick.

3xp

It almost feels like superhuman efforts are being deployed to prevent viewers from interacting with artworks in as unmediated a manner as possible for fear that… they'd feel adrift and lose interest? I don't get it.

the piece just duchamp's bottle rack with a hardware store gazing ball on top of it. pretty easy to "read" to be honest if you're familiar with the two artists. pretty banal. but no, the caption doesn't simply try to explicate the piece -- neutralizing whatever "mischievous" tone was intended -- but claims in a blasé fashion that it is "one of the most concise and direct expressions of Jeff Koons’ iconic œuvre." what's really being said here isn't just "this is what the piece means," it's "this is why it is important."

“like, the language of the art world is designed to confer importance onto objects, or justify their value to collectors. so there is an element of mystification involved with this kind of language, that's its purpose.”

There is definitely that element. In my brief submersion into the contemporary art world in 90s though I didn’t feel any censorship, theoretical discourse drove the conversation but I thought there was an openness and acceptance of different visions

I spent a whole day with Jeff Koons once, he was monomaniacal in being a salesman for his art

It certainly paid off.

even reading his name causes me to feel a crushing sense of depression.

Fuck Houellebecq the man, but his ekphrasis of an imaginary painting titled 'Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst Dividing Up the Art Market' in The Map and the Territory is both spot-on and hilarious.

i feel like he is really big with collectors but kind of passé. within the art world, the kind of work people think is really happening'is explicitly political in an identity-driven sense. this article is pretty good at tracing the origins of this tendency:

https://www.vulture.com/2016/04/identity-politics-that-forever-changed-art.html

just check out what a group of curators named as the most important 25 artworks of the past 25 years.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/t-magazine/most-important-contemporary-art.html

there is nothing wrong with this kind of art but something does happen when your standard lens for understanding/justifying art becomes "how does this work overturn norms and challenge hegemony?" if that is your single criteria, that's when the censoriousness comes in, more from the curators than the artists in my humble opinion. the curators are looking to determine the potential impact of the work -- or even the "harm" -- and evaluate *that* so the idea that a work can be ambiguous, even problematic, and still good just doesn't compute.

Houellebecq can be funny as fuck at times, unlike most directors of art galleries.

it's sort of funny. the fact that the art world is hypercapitalistic, and even a front for money laundering to some extent, is what drove the rise in mystifying language. but then left wing politics, in the form of posturing, also gets wrapped up in this process of mystification. so there is just this essential incoherence that makes spending too many afternoons gallery hopping in chelsea just like a nauseating process.

BUT--despite it all--there is still great art being made and great shows being put on. i, too, dislike it ect.

I spent a whole day with Jeff Koons once, he was monomaniacal in being a salesman for his art

― Dan S, Monday, September 28, 2020 7:29 PM (fifteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is interesting dan. what was the backstory here?

The question I always ask myself is: if art's sole function is to 'overturn norms and challenge hegemony', do we need it at all? Should we not instead turn to whichever mass medium happens to be most influential at a given point in time?

i mean, there is a tradition of "anti-art" in the avant garde, trying to push the contradictions of art to the point when it collapses. these artists are ironically sort of particularly beloved by institutions though lol

In a joint statement released quietly on Monday, the museum directors said that they were “postponing the exhibition until a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston’s work can be more clearly interpreted.”

i find this so depressing. it sounds like this work would be pretty damned relevant right now, but they assume that any work of art that deals with these issues is going to be misinterpreted (and judged accordingly) unless the message is insultingly obvious.

Oh, of course, and I'm totally on board with it, but that's not a particularly instrumentalist vision of art, which is what I take issue with (or rather: all art is instrumentalist on some level, but pursuing that facet of it at the expense of all others generally results in failure, both political and aesthetic).

xp

i think what they actually felt was fear that people would object to a white artist representing racism in his work. they don't want to repeat the dana schulz debacle of a few years ago. xp

xxp treeship I was with a friend who had bought Koons’ String of Puppies sculpture, the one he was sued over. (It is really beautiful in a creepy way, in my opinion.) Koons drove us from his studio in Northern Italy to Munich, talking about himself and Cicciolina the whole way, about their determination to make art out of pornography. I wasn’t opposed to the concept, and I have to admit in retrospect I kind of liked him

Damn, your friend must be loaded.

what was your impression of koons' relationship with cicciolina, from talking to him? did he see them as collaborators or was he mostly interested in the "idea" of her, as has been charged?

wasn’t sure about that, but it did seem like they were in the project together

oh wow! people are talking about this on ILX!! ... it's interesting in that several of my more hardcore leftist + anti-racist friends think cancelling the Guston show is ridiculous. These are the same people that are very focused on decolonizing the art world by getting rid of the rich white people that tend to run art museums and similar institutions.

maybe we can have a thread for treeship and me and whomever else to shake our heads at the art world we used to work in.

Fuck a duck, I was going to work on installing the Guston show at my museum. Pissed that it's going to be a while longer. In a way, I get it. The curators weren't expecting this to be a hot show, and suddenly it's more relevant than they are prepared to deal with. They need more time to rewrite all of the copy, labels, etc to reflect what's going on now and how that relates to Guston. Because they're going to be writing about race, they are going to need to bring in other writers and voices so it's not only white curators writing about it (because 95% of the curators are white). The issues will still be relevant in 2024.

Other considerations: exhibition schedules and loans are all fucked up due to Covid. Timetables and installation deadlines are jacked up and art loans that require a courier are often off the table now. The people who work behind the scenes to make these exhibitions happen (I'm not just talking about curators, but registrars, conservators, preparators, etc) are all pulling their hair out. If all of those factors were removed, then maybe they could figure out a way for Guston to happen. But I can totally see institutions delaying it right now to resolve scheduling conflicts and to buy time to avoid fucking up the presention of the work.

The people writing about art are rarely artists and that's okay. I don't really trust artists to fully understand how their art fits into the world. But I've been around curators speculating about artist's intentions and it is often laughable. I'm an artist and I think you have to be one to really get how nonlinear the creative process is. A critic can look at a piece of art and place it in the art history/theory framework, but that says more about how our culture processes art than it does about that particular art work. I can't deal with reading most of that stuff.

I wonder if this is a more straightforward commercial decision with a figleaf of social media demon over the top of it. They're probably more worried about the great expense of moving artworks around the world at a time when visitor numbers will be massively down than they are about Nazis turning up or bovine woke caricatures going 'cancel the Tate'.

If they hadn't adequately contextualised the exhibition beforehand they were doing something wrong because a) it's not that hard to do and b) it's not as if the rest of the world only realised the KKK were bad three months ago.

I saw The Guardian piece yesterday and now Cow_art's post puts it all in a more favourable context (it's in the last quote of The Guardian report too...that need for re-writing)

art is anarchic. it must be contextualized, pinned to the wall like a suffocating butterfly.

― treeship., Monday, 28 September 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Lol, anarchic, sure. Are you 17?

It has to be about more than the need for rewriting, it doesn't take four years to rewrite the copy or recontextualise it with new voices. I would imagine there are wider transportation, funding and scheduling issues getting in the way to prolong the delay.

There's an interesting difference between cancelling art because of supposed racism, or cancelling it because you think your audience won't understand. But I'm not sure if the decision here is taken in good faith because of either, thanks also to Cow Art's excellent post.

Separate the artist from the art and the art from the audience. Separate all the things.

Another angle: changethemuseum on instagram has made museums hyper aware that they are being watched. Sure, they should trust their audience. But given how tenuous their connection to their larger community is, institutions are terrified of fucking this up. I don't blame them, they are out of touch and largely white.

Lol, anarchic, sure. Are you 17?

― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, September 29, 2020 6:48 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

maybe "anarchic" was the wrong word. in the context of the post, though, it was clear what i was saying -- museums, galleries and auction houses have a mania for contextualization that at times can seem kind of comically straight-laced and faux objective. there is a tension between the works themselves and the institutions that present them. not to say both things aren't mutually dependent on one another.

actually, scratch that. ambiguity is anarchic in just a literal sense. it doesn't destroy hierarchical systems of meaning but it destabilizes them. there will always be a sense of tension between the text -- with its slippages and points of contradiction and whatever -- and the meaning that is being ascribed to it by the canon-makers and canon-breakers alike.

cow art made the same point better than i did

A critic can look at a piece of art and place it in the art history/theory framework, but that says more about how our culture processes art than it does about that particular art work. I can't deal with reading most of that stuff.

― Cow_Art, Monday, September 28, 2020 10:49 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Ambiguity dictates that it be simultaneously ordered and chaotic.

Arguing for communism are we now?

actually, scratch that. ambiguity is anarchic in just a literal sense. it doesn't destroy hierarchical systems of meaning but it destabilizes them. there will always be a sense of tension between the text -- with its slippages and points of contradiction and whatever -- and the meaning that is being ascribed to it by the canon-makers and canon-breakers alike.

― treeship., Tuesday, 29 September 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Look now in that silly post you are saying art is anarchic but a gallery show needs to curate, place context, make the thing flow for the viewer as he walks from room to room. Put something as there is an educational purpose that people may choose to engage with or not. I know a lot of it is unsatisfying as I spend far more time groaning at what's written as I go through it, but it doesn't mean the act suffocates the art at all.

you're such an asshole

you're trying to make it seem like i made some kind of naive-romantic case for art's transcendence, but i didn't.

also, you never worked in the art world. the discourse does suffocate the art. some art is made with this discourse in mind as artists need to create work that is "legible" to the market.

I'm telling you, as a viewer, that the discourse often doesn't, even when it looks like it might be as tiresome as you are being rn.

The art-talk can be suffocating if you work in that arena and you're IN IT. As a viewer, it's pretty easy to ignore. How many people take the time to read labels?

If you're a music freak who reads reviews and essays all day, it can change how you hear music for better or worse. But that's on you.

My perspective is like, this is how some people think about x. If you engage it will affect the way you hear and see things, but there are a variety of approaches you can expose yourself to.

fascinating

I've only really been peripherally around the art world, and in both cities I've lived in - Glasgow and Vancouver - the artists I've spent time around all do installations and are all very into art theory and talking about art in that same artist statement language. it's quite alienating, especially as someone who does read a decent amount of abstruse literature, to not be able to engage with that language at all as it is just pure jargon to me

In my grad school program (San Jose State U), there was a department called CADRE. Computer in Art, Design, Research & Education. But it came down to very theoretical art, often installations, that focused on ideas. Which... fine. That's cool. In my opinion it focused on ideas at the expense of the physicality of what was being created. The people in this department could often talk circles around everybody and generate a LOT of text, but the actual work was so ignorant of materials and the IDEAS were half-baked or inscrutable.

A lot of it focused on science. The artists would attempt to use scientific ideas and principles mashed up with art concepts, but in the end it wound up being lousy art and horrible science.

But that's me. Some folks really got off on it. For some art is a linguistic game, and that is not my interest whatsoever.

For some art is a linguistic game

To add to your line about it being lousy art and horrible science: it's also lousy literature and horrible theory.

John Caldwell who was curator at SF MOMA in the early 90s was an amazing voice. He made theoretical discussion about art seem relatable and exciting to me. He was also a great person. He died of a heart attack all those years ago and i still miss him

art is anarchic. it must be contextualized, pinned to the wall like a suffocating butterfly.

― treeship., Monday, 28 September 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Lol, anarchic, sure. Are you 17?

― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, September 29, 2020 6:48 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I think that was very well said, actually. Asinine response to an excellent post.

A lot of it focused on science. The artists would attempt to use scientific ideas and principles mashed up with art concepts, but in the end it wound up being lousy art and horrible science.

hahahah yeah, from my experience in the SF Bay Area art world, the most interesting work is often done by artists who don't go through these programs, or do so later in life. I think at least one faculty member from the CADRE department was an artist I've worked with. I forget whether their writing about their work was actually decent or was one of those statements that I would see far too often where I scour the text for "what does the work look like?" and "what do you think is most interesting about your work?" and "please say something about your work or your art practice in your own voice rather than what you wrote for a bullshit MFA paper" ... but the Bay is a small scene with relatively low stakes, so it would be a serious dick move to publicly complain.

Anyway, I remember the social practices/relational aesthetics trend which resulted in lousy art and bad sociology or whatever it was they were using as rationales for their work. I've seen a bunch of "data visualization" type work in the past 5 years that makes me angry. But I think some of that is coming from a "stay in your lane" type of response.

Definitely the "art world" does not want to stay in its lane, it is colonialist when it comes to other disciplines (I had to pause and try and remember whether I'd recently ranted about this here or somewhere else) -- like "sound art" and "movement art" -- it puts music and dance (and many other creative disciplines) into its "art" framework, whereas "the music world" does not try and subsume painting or sculpture into musical terms.

Definitely the "art world" does not want to stay in its lane, it is colonialist when it comes to other disciplines (I had to pause and try and remember whether I'd recently ranted about this here or somewhere else) -- like "sound art" and "movement art" -- it puts music and dance (and many other creative disciplines) into its "art" framework, whereas "the music world" does not try and subsume painting or sculpture into musical terms.

― sarahell, Wednesday, September 30, 2020

agree with this

I know this is way off topic

I really like Harry Bertoia’s sound sculptures, haven’t seen them in person but they look beautiful in photographs and the music has fascinated me - the Sonambient recordings and ‘Unfolding’ on PSF records. The discourse around them did incorporate some art theory but it was in more musical terms.

I’ve liked some of the writing from an art theory perspective about more recent sound works (Christina Kubisch, Jaqueline Kiyomi Gordon) but it seems like the art discussion has focused on them more as visual works with a sound component rather than sound works with a visual component.

I did have a personal experience with a Philip Guston painting. The same friend who owned the String of Puppies sculpture also had the most amazing Guston painting I’ve ever seen, “Flatlands”. The photographs of it online don’t show at all how incredible it is, but it has almost everything - the pink textural background, the sun, a pointing finger leading you through the painting, hooded figures with slits for eyes, the underside of a boot with rivets, a tree trunk, clocks, a chopped off bare ankle and foot, and mysterious block-like objects maybe as a representation of civilization. It is now owned by SFMOMAl

Guston is a total bad-ass.

I don’t want to come off as conservative here. I don’t think art needs to stay in its lane or restrict itself in any way. It’s possible to make great art out of anything.

I get disturbed when the art focuses so much on one component, such as the Idea, that other elements are not considered. Some folk drift toward conceptual art because they are thrilled by the seemingly endless possibilities. They can follow an idea to its conclusion and realize it in whatever physical form it necessitates. Others go that direction because they suck at craftsmanship and they think they can get away with making dim manifestations of overwrought or half-baked concepts.

When the Thing does not match the Idea, it reeks.

Harry Bertoia's fine as wine, in sound and vision, lots of musos went to art school, some mainly to avoid having to get a job, like Keith Richard, but musical presentation, in concert, on albums covers, publicity pix, and for a long time now, videos, always the visual components, and I've always liked "multimedia" shows, though aren't they all, and Fluxus, Laurie Anderson, mixing art and music world skills, School of Design student David Byrne, always considering the visuals, even when busking---also, on stage, as dance becomes more immersive, writing for Twyla Tharp and the dancers in his show teaching the players and vice versa.
(Of course there's also what David Letterman said: "Tony Bennett's paintings are pretty good, for Tony Bennett.")

Tim Lawrence makes the back and forth of art and music and other things seem like a lot of fun in Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980–1983

In an open letter published Wednesday in The Brooklyn Rail, nearly 100 artists, curators, dealers and writers forcefully condemned the decision last week by the National Gallery of Art in Washington and three other major museums to pull the plug on the largest retrospective in 15 years of one of America’s most influential postwar painters

From NY Times article
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/arts/design/philip-guston-shows-open-letter.html

I love Guston’s work. But I also suspect that 3 white curators, and 11 out of 14 non-Black catalogue contributors (one of whom is Dana Schutz), may not be the best people to frame his work at this moment. Yes we may need a Guston show, but not ANY Guston show.

— Aruna D'Souza (@arunadsouza) September 26, 2020

It is now owned by SFMOMAl

haha I was reading the description and thinking, "that sounds familiar ... I think I've seen this ... up close and personal" -- pretty sure this was one of my fave pieces when they did the retrospective a while back.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LVXTB30hp2oNz1Vm4P8jpXgg4sIieWNbdaqWqffHcN4

^ Brooklyn Rail Open Letter of protest demanding the show run

While I think that the delay of the Guston shows are understandable and the reasons are more varied and complex than most folks realize, I am perfectly cool with people being pissed and using this as a way to force institutions to talk about race and how euro-centric their priorities are.

I say we cancel art altogether until world peace is achieved. So far it's just gotten in the way of political progress, what with its potential for vacuity and its superfluity and its equivocity. The only way to get American (and British) institutions to discuss race and Eurocentrism is to stop the Guston exhibition dead in its tracks.

Sorry for the snark, but this sets a dangerous precedent. And it cheapens the cause it purports to defend, leaving us with a binary choice between good propaganda and bad propaganda.

I think art museums are also scared because there has been a lot of high-profile criticism related to race and equity in terms of leadership and executive pay vs. pay for other staff, which has gotten fiercer in the context of large layoffs due to Covid.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/05/06/philip-guston-national-gallery-woke-ku-klux-klan-postponed/

So the postponed 2020 Guston exhibition opened finally in Boston in 2022, and now in Washington DC

https://media.tate.org.uk/aztate-prd-ew-dg-wgtail-st1-ctr-data/images/Female_Nude_with_Easel__5235-007_SBD_1.width-1200.jpg

I went to see his (inexplicably delayed for a few years) exhibition at the Tate Modern and it's fucking great - unfortunately it's only on for another week though. Seeing so much of his later stuff in one place helps you really appreciate it more than you might have before - and by "you" I mean "me". So many things I didn't know about him too, like how young (and good) he was when he started plus his communism and the murals. There was also a film about him which looked great but didn't have time to stay and watch (I had to go to the Don Van Vliet exhibition on the other side of town!) A total admirable human being too it would appear.

I did have a personal experience with a Philip Guston painting. The same friend who owned the String of Puppies sculpture also had the most amazing Guston painting I’ve ever seen, “Flatlands”. The photographs of it online don’t show at all how incredible it is, but it has almost everything - the pink textural background, the sun, a pointing finger leading you through the painting, hooded figures with slits for eyes, the underside of a boot with rivets, a tree trunk, clocks, a chopped off bare ankle and foot, and mysterious block-like objects maybe as a representation of civilization. It is now owned by SFMOMAl

This was in the show.

Was there yesterday too. Can't say I connected with it -- apart from the handful of self-portraits and some of the early work -- but I am glad I got to see it.

I saw this same show at the National Gallery in Washington, and yes, I appreciate his work but also have a hard time finding a way into it. It does make you appreciate how late it takes some artists to find their true voice. I think Mark Rothko was in his 40s or 50s before he hit upon the style that he's most famous for.